Product: Sans Digital TowerRAID TR8X
Manufacturer: Sans Digital
MSRP: $499 (without disks) $1098 with8 – 500gb SATA drives      Find Lowest Price @ PriceGrabber
Author: Bill
Date: October 20, 2009

As our digital lives grow beyond the confines of our internal hard drives, more and more we turn to external solutions to carry the weight. A simple external hard drive is a convenient choice, but offers the risk of data loss if it incurs damage. To backup data entirely, twice the space would need to be purchased; RAID solves this problem elegantly by distributing the data across multiple disks, but requires dedicated hardware to accomplish the rapid and complicated process of distributing data and parity bits across multiple disks. Storing the disks in a clean, working, and elegant system is another common problem. As a university student, I eschewed this process and settled for a pile of hard drives on top of a Tupperware bin. While functional, enterprise users will be attracted to a product such as the TowerRaid, which is decidedly less “ghetto fabulous” than my solution.

Packaging

Two hernia-inducing boxes arrived, carrying the drives and the enclosure respectively. The tower is enclosed in a well-padded cardboard box, and is surprisingly heavy. Additionally, eight hard drives already loaded in sliding trays were found in another box, along with the needed cables and documentation.

The TowerRaid

This product is a simple machine with only one purpose: hold running drives in a cool and powered environment. It does not have hardware to process any data coming from the disks, but rather multiplexes the signals from the backplane into two miniSAS connectors on the back of the enclosure. These two connectors run the data from four SATA disks simultaneously, and will need to be connected appropriately or adapted to the host computer. Sans Digital was kind enough to include the miniSAS to infiniband cables required to connect the enclosure to my RocketRAID controller.

The other major component of the system is a power supply, which appeared to be a generic ATX power supply with around 300w of power. Power and data is supplied to the drives by means of a tray-less backplane system that allows for hot-plug operation. My drives came pre-loaded in their trays, but would need to be screwed in with four included screws.

The trays feel cheap and flimsy, but hold the weight of the drives without trouble. Their locking handles are frustrating to operate and the drives stick in the rails, making installation and removal a bit of a guessing game. I finally took to smacking the trays home in their bays with the ball of my palm. An attractive door made of lightweight plastic covers the trays. Its locking latch felt like it would break at any moment, so I kept myself from closing/opening the door with too much force. The front the tower includes a power button and indicator LEDs for hard drive access and data-lane activity.

The rear of the enclosure is made of solidly pressed steel, and houses the intake fan, power supply, and miniSAS ports. When on and running, the system makes as much noise as two desk fans; a quite noticeable whirring, but nothing too obtrusive.

Performance Testing

I have deliberately chosen not to test the performance of the enclosure for anything other than erroneous operation. The thoroughput and read/write performance you will get from this product will be entirely dependant on the types and speeds of drives and RAID hardware on the host.

I tested the enclosure to ensure that it did not bottleneck performance in any way with its backplane and miniSAS port multiplier, and it does not. RAID 5 and JBOD operation was on par with my current setup, and is representative of my HighPoint RocketRAID card and 7200rpm SATA drives with 16MB caches.

Conclusions

This is clearly an enclosure for the enterprise consumer given its price, although an enclosure that supports eight drives is tempting for $600. SAS solutions are all priced in this way, which makes me curious as to the material costs of the devices. $600 is competitive for this niche market, however. The tower is attractive, but cheaply built and in no way delivers a sense of quality for cost. Still, it does the job well. Drives ran quietly, and as a whole the unit was suitably quiet to live under my desk. It does not bottleneck performance, and offers an elegant way to manage eight disks without a birds-nest of wires.

Pros

+ Elegant design
+ Good performance
+ Easy installation and setup – drive trays work well

Cons

- Low build-quality

Tags: SansDigital, TowerRaid, TR8X