We confirm that TR5M 5 bay model only recognize 4 drives instead of 5. We recommend using TR4M instead.

Thanks,

Best regards
Stanley

Stanley,

Thanks for all your support here. After googling around I found that our friends at Frys have the TR4M back in stock after a 2-3 month hiatus.

$149 has been the best price I've recently found on the TR4M-S

Does that cable in the box work will with the MSS for Esata?

http://shop2.frys.com/product/5692941

Mine is on the way

Yes!

I'm jealous. $149 is a great price for this enclosure. When I do the conversion from what they're selling it in Canada ($260 CAD), it's still $212 U.S. I'm waiting patiently for the price to go down somewhat.

I have the CFI Terrabox+ and it has been working fine until today.

Up until now I've only had 1 drive in the CFI (the 1 TB Seagate ST31000340AS). Today I purchased another drive (the 1.5 TB Seagate ST31500341AS). The 1 TB drive is installed in drive bay 1 so I installed the 1.5 TB drive in bay 2.

At first, everything ran fine. The server identified the drive, I added it to the pool and the drive light for number 1 and 2 were on.

Then, strange things started to happen. The drive light for number 2 would go out and then videos would start to hang and the server would also hang. I had to force a reboot which would sometimes work (which would go through the whole process again i.e. both drive lights would be on but after a few minutes the drive light for number 2 would go out and the server would stop responding). Other times when I forced a reboot, none of the lights would come on (including the drive lights on the actual server). I removed the 1.5 TB drive and tried another bay and the same thing would happen. When I removed the 1.5 TB drive completely, all these issues would go away.

Unless I have a faulty drive, I'm tending to get the feeling that the CFI does not like the 1.5 TB drive. I'm currently in the process of removing one of the 1 TB drives in the main server and swapping it with the 1.5 TB drive. I will then try 2 x 1 TB drives in the CFI. If this works, then this should confirm my suspicions. I will make a post once I complete this process.

I have 3-1.5 TB and 1-1.0 TB Seagates in a Sans Digital TR4M (which, I believe is the same box as the CFI). All of them are working just fine. Check the firmware on the 1.5 TB drive. I put two 1.5's with firmware CC1G in the TR4M and they were not showing up correctly (they were showing up as SCSI drives rather than SATA drives), so I replaced them with two 1.5's with firmware SD17. See the screenshot below. Disks 4 - 7 are in the TR4M. If you think it's a drive problem there is a firmware update for the 1.5 Seagates, but you have to call Seagate to get the firmware.

Thanks for the tip.

The firmware on my drive is CC1G so I'll have to give Seagate a call.

After adding the 1.5 TB drive to one of the internal bays, it still did the same thing so it's no the CFI.

I rang Seagate and they said that drives with firmware SD17 should be flashed to SD1A and drives with CC1G should be flashed to CC1H.

They sent we and e-mail with a link and a certificate to upgrade the firmware to CC1H. I preformed the upgrade but I still get the same issue.

Has anyone used this in a RAID 5 configuration?

The review at We Got Served mentioned that you could do this without WMS even being aware of it. However, I haven't seen any mention of how you would go about array reconstruction (if a drive died, etc)?


Also, does anyone know what kind of bus the eSata port is on in the MSS? I'm curious whether one could mod it to use one of the Sans Digital 2-port eSata cards, so you could run with two of these?

I have the TR4M with Seagate 1.5tb drives CC1H and it is working great!

Unfortunately I have found that I need more space. USB is my only option left and it looks like I will need to use the TR4U.. or some other USB storage device.

I have a question:

I am wondering if using the TR4U will work with the 20mb/s throughput for streaming movies and to add more space and would it be worth it to add. I am currently using the MSS to stream my movies to my Vista Media Center and can't tell whether I should attempt to use the USB storage as part of the storage pool.

Will it decrease the overall speed of my MSS or only when accessing the USB TR4U?

I would like to be able to designate specifically the duplication to the TR4U and keep the TR4M along with the HP EX470 as the main streaming drives..

Anyone have an Addin that will do that? Anyone willing to create one?

I'm so excited!!! I just finished doing an online purchase of the TR4M-B enclosure from newegg.ca as part of their boxing day (similar to U.S. Black Friday) promotion for $220 CAD minus a 15% paypal credit promotion that newegg.ca and Paypal are having saving another $33 CAD for a total of $187 CAD ($154 U.S.) which is comparable to the $149 U.S. price that I saw this baby selling for in an earlier post. Plus free shipping!!!!!

Got inspired to appreciate my EX470 some more after learning that, FOR NOW, the new Encore boxes (EX485/7) do not support port multipliers on their esata port vs. the current MSS servers.

Can you tell I'm happy? That's because I am.

UPS delivered my unit earlier today. Hooked it up to the MSS and had to reboot the MSS for it to recognize the unit and drives.

Not that I plan to but it doesn't appear like I can configure the RAID settings from within an RDP session within the mediasmart. It starts by trying to discover the esata card included with the unit which I don't need with the MSS. Has anyone been able to configure the RAID from within the MSS or do you have to do that on a separate PC?

Otherwise, it's been reasonably plug n play.

Happy New Year.

I think Stanley from Sans Digital is still on holidays. There's been some great questions in some of the previous posts with no responses.

As earlier requested, I'm particularly interested on how to perform RAID setups with the MSS and RAID re-construction should a drive failed. This is kind of an important one.

I'm now also interested in purchasing the 1.5 TB drives but with some of the firmware issues, I'm a little tentative and there doesn't appear to be a way to tell prior to purchasing one from what I'm understanding. It would be the ideal purchase to maximize my storage though.

I don't believe that throughput will be a problem with the USB 2.0 ports that the MSS has. Theoretical maximums of USB 2.0 is 480 Mbps with real-world about 40 Mbps which should be good enough for streaming. Reference: http://www.everythingusb.com/usb2/faq.htm (point 4)

However, I do notice a real-world speed difference between USB and SATA drives that, if drives are configured correctly, can support up to 3 Gbps or 1.5 Gbps at a minimum. You can add USB drives to the pool with SATA drives but it's been my experience that it slows the whole pool down. The streaming would still be adequate but you will suffer a performance hit.

I'm not aware of the ability to target duplication to the slower USB devices but that would be cool if it existed.

If you are doing server or backup DB backups (using the add-in), a consideration might be to get the USB enclosure and set that up outside of the pool for backups only reserving your sata devices for the day to day grind. If I get to the point where I need more storage than the sata interfaces can provide, that's what I will likely do.

Just got the WD 1TB EADS drive today, hooked up my TR4M, rebooted the MSS, all is good here!!!