Buy Mediasonic HFR2-SU3S2 ProRaid 4 Bay External Hard Drive Enclosure - USB 3.0 & eSATAMediasonic HFR2-SU3S2 ProRaid 4 Bay External Hard Drive Enclosure - USB 3.0 & eSATA Product Description:
- Support 3.5" SATA I / II / III hard disk drive up to 4TB per drive
- Hardware Raid controller built-in on board with one-button control
- Transfer rate up to 5.0Gbps via USB 3.0, up to 3.0Gbps via eSATA
- Smart Fan with built-in thermal-sensor, auto & manual modes, and 3 speed levels
- Compatible with Macbook USB 3.0
Product Description
Mediasonic HFR2-SU3S2 Pro Raid Box is a 4 Bay Enclosure. The main feature of Pro Raid Box is its Hardware Embedded Raid function. It supports RAID 0/1/3/5/10. Support 3.5" SATA I/II/III hard disk drive up to 3TB per drive, Hardware Raid controller built-in on board, Transfer rate up to 5.0Gbps via USB 3.0, Transfer rate up to 3.0Gbps via eSATA, Power Sync: Power off in synchronization with PC, One button for RAID control,Forced Convection Process, Smart Fan function.
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
45 of 47 people found the following review helpful.
By J. Brown
I bought this unit because it did hardware RAID5, had USB3, eSata, supported 4 drives, and was little. It accomplished every single one of those goals very nicely, but it's not perfect. I'll get to that in a second. I bought this unit to use as a backup volume for my machine. I had 2 1.5TB drives laying around, so I bought a 3rd to make a RAID5 Volume.Setup was very easy - after mounting the pull fixtures to the drives, I slid them in, turned in on. I then held in the RAID button until it flashed, touched it again until it was on RAID5, then pressed the RAID confirmation button on the back, which is hidden behind a removable panel. I then hooked the drive up to the esata port, partitioned in, and formatted it.Pros:* Size. This is about 8" wide, 10" tall, and a 10" long. It's compact and easy to carry around.* USB3 is fast - I haven't actually used USB3, but it is backwards compatible with USB2* eSata is also fast. This is how I have it hooked up, and it works nicely in Ubuntu Linux without a hitch. Many people will tell you this unit needs a SATA card that supports port replication in order to function. I'm here to tell you they are wrong.* Because of the hardware RAID support, the OS sees all the drives as a single volume, so no port replication is necessary (if you are using RAID). This is an epic win. Note: If you are using this as a JBOD housing, you will need to have a card that supports port replication (thanks to Ryan for the clarification on this in the comments).* Hot swap. If one of the drives die, just pull it out and replace it.* Cooling. The fan on the back is a good nice, and the auto fan adjustment means that the drives shouldn't overheat.* Cost. This is way cheaper than a ReadyNAS or a Drobo, but that is because some of the cons.Cons:* The power cord connection is on the side. Having it in the back would be really nice.* There is no way to dynamically resize a volume. I have 3 drives in there now. If I want to add a forth drive, I need to recreate the RAID, losing all my data. This is a unit used for backup, so it's not the end of the world, but it would be nice.* The pictures on Amazon aren't quite right. There are no dip switches anymore - the unit automatically configures itself when you setup the RAID.* There is no way to get status on an individual drive, other than the lights on the front. If the unit is running degraded, there is no way to notify the OS, to notify me. This unit is in my basement, so I don't look at the lights very often.* Speaking of lights, they are very, very bright. Not an issue for me, since it's in my basement, but if you plan on using this for a home theater application, it could be.Overall, I am quite pleased with this unit. Being able to have a RAID5 enclosure whilst only using a single eSata port, and not needing a port replicator compatible card is a big win.The biggest issue is really trying to figure out what file system to put on it. I am definitely recommending this to my friends.
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
By BluJai
Installation------------Installing drives was painless. However, note the items below were not explicitly covered in the quick start and required careful examination of the PDF user guide to ascertain. I include them to hopefully ease the process for others.* Installing drives of varying sizes appears to be unsupported (though I could find no documentation to confirm or deny). I expected the RAID to be treated as a group of disks of the size of the smallest, e.g., three 1TB and one 750GB would look look four 750GB drives in RAID.* Changing the RAID setting is a three-step process. 1) Hold the RAID button for ~3 seconds until the illuminated level begins blinking. 2) Press the RAID button multiple times until the level you want is selected. 3) Remove the black plastic tab/cover on the back of the device and press the button it obfuscates while the RAID level light is still blinking. The device will power off and when you turn it back on it will rebuild with the new settings.* The metal drive cover you place between the drives and the front door of the device has two stiff, spring-loaded tabs on its top. You must depress their levers to properly install the drive cover.Reliability-----------The device works well so far, though I've only had it a few days. It is connected to a UPS (the same one protecting the server it is connected to) and stayed up during a power spike. I simulated a failure in my RAID 5 setup by removing a drive while the device was connected and in use. Open files remained usable while the drive was missing and the RAID began rebuilding as soon as it was replaced. Files are still usable while rebuilding.Windows 7 x64 SP1 recognized the drive immediately with only my on-board eSATA connection. It was recognized as a RAID 5 HW RAID device and required no driver installation.Speed------------The device currently bears four 2TB Western Digital green (three -EARS and one -EADS) drives in RAID5. It is connected to the PC via eSATA. Writing transfer speed is reliably in excess of 90MB/s. Often it runs over 110MB/s. The same drives when used internally would normally only transfer around 65-88MB/s. I feel confident that were I using faster drives and/or RAID0 that the transfer speed would be even better.Reliability Update (2013-01-12)------------The device is still going strong nearly two years since purchase. It is on 24/7 serving files across a home network to 8 devices (though simultaneous access is usually only 3). Fortunately there have been no drive failures, so the only RAID stability I can confirm is that mentioned above. However, I have no hesitation in recommending this product.
27 of 31 people found the following review helpful.
By uvr
In the first days using this device (HFR2-SU3S2) I discovered several issues and perform some tests. First of all, I full the device with: 4 x Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD20EARS. I configured the HFR2-SU3S2 in RAID 5.ISSUES======1. Transfer rate is not about 500 MB/s as many people could expect. Average transfer rate is 55 MB/s with rare maximum peaks of 120 MB/s (less than 2 MB/s was the lowest peak).2. The sleeping mode does not work if connected through USB 3.0, only connected through USB 2.0. I did not test through eSATA.3. The worst (for me) is that eventhough it says in the box that is compatible with Win7, it is not 100% true. HFR2-SU3S2 is not compatible (at least) with Win7 Check Disk Utility (CDU). When I run the CDU against HFR2-SU3S2 the utility does not do anything. PROBLEM: I disconected by mistake the HFR2-SU3S2 without use the Safely Remove Hardware Utility and after that, every single time I connected again the HFR2-SU3S2 Win7 showed me a message saying: "There might be a problem with some files on this device..." and asks for "Sacan and fix (recommended)" or "Continue without scanning".But as CDU does not work with this device, the message never disappeared (just clicking in "Contnue without scanning" every single time). So I had to backup all the data and format the device to avoid this message to appear again. So you need to have another device where to backup your data if you face the same problem and want to avoid that message. All this happend eventhough I have configured the Win7 Removal Policy to "Quick Removal".This device does not come with any own kind of monitoring or verifying software.4. Other very bad issue is the virtually lack of support. The Mediasonic Forum Support people (Mediasonic technicians), told me that everything would solve upgrading de driver and firmware to last version. But, They do not take any responsability nor give any warranty if this firmware upgrade raise any problem. Firmware upgrade cannot be downgraded so that, if it raise any problem there is no way to go back. This lack of warranty for the firmware is because (different than other brands) they use third-party firmwares, not any kind of own (Mediasonic manufactured) firmwares. And there are several customers (in the same Mediasonic Support forums) saying that after firmware upgrade they experimented problems (that they did not have before). I just upgraded driver (which can be downgraded) but nothing changed. I would upgrade the firmware always and when Mediasonic take responsibility about this "solution", but they do not.When I insisted for certified (under Mediasonic warranty) solutions and ask for more support, and the Mediasonic technicians lack of solutions, they simply write: "So Microsoft is bigger company, are perfect?? .. Windows OS have many many problems since day 1... end of story. /Locked it" and they lock and stop the support thread.FAILURE TEST============I turned off the device and changed one disk of it by another identical (same exact model) which does not works (it is totally death) and then turned it on again. The HFR2-SU3S2 reported the failure disk but the data was available (good!). I turned off the device and changed the disk by another identical which is in a good condition and does not have partitions nor format. The device performed successfully the rebuild process (good!). This process took 8 hours but the data was available during all the process. As you can see I did not test the hot swap capacity of the device, because it is not important to this particular case. The amount of data in the device during the test was less than 200 GB (but remember that it is distributed in all disks because the RAID 5 config).It seems than from the total features that the device should do, the only one it does in the way that customers expect (based on Mediasonic publicity), is the failure protection.If I would have any news/changes about this review, I will come back to write it.MY GEAR=======OS: Windows 7 Enterprise x64CPU: Core i7 950 3.07GhzMotherboard: Asus P6X58D PremiumMemory: Patriot Viper II Sector 7 DDR3 24GB (6x4) 1600MhzGraphics Card(s): 2 x Sapphire Radeon HD5450Monitor(s) Displays: 2 x ViewSonic VX1940WCase: CoolerMaster Cosmos 1000 / CoolerMaster Silent Pro Gold 800WHard Drives:Internal--------1 x SSD OCZ Agility 2 Series 120G SATA II1 x Seagate 1.5TB SATA II2 x WD Green Caviar 2TB WD20EARS SATA II (RAID 1)External--------Mediasonic ProRAID HFR2-SU3S2 with 4 x WD 2TB WD20EARS SATA II (RAID 5) through USB 3.0
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