Fusion D500P E-series Sata 5BAY Enclosure with cables Trays No Drives

Customer Reviews

Average Customer Review




Good array with the G series serial numbers, November 13, 2009
By Aaron Linsdau (San Diego, CA USA)
This tower is used for editing in Final Cut Pro, FCP, on a Macbook Pro Intel through a Sonnet Express/34 card. With the G series tower, all 5 500GB drives come up without issue and haven't had any trouble with the speed.

We also use the G series tower on a WinXP-Pro machine as a partial JBOD and RAID-1 configuration as a multi-drive backup. Everything works just fine with that. XP Pro has to be specially set up to work with Raid-1, by the way.

We have one tower with an H series serial number and a G series serial number. The H series has an underpowered power supply for drives 500GB and bigger. We had to send the H-series D500P in at a fair amount of cost to have the power supply and back plates replaced to support larger drives. We expect that upon return, the H-series tower should work just fine.

What would happen is, on the Mac & PC, some drives wouldn't come up and their connections would have to be cycled. It was as though the tower crossed its arms and randomly decided to confer you all 5 drives. Also, we had one drive go down due to a conversion to GPT partition. We weren't sure it if was the drive or the power supply issue. The problem came out of no where..and it was the backup drive.

Once we contacted Sonnet tech and learned about the power supply issue, we threw the credit card down and shipped it out for upgrade. Once the tower gets back, we expect that everything will be fine.
We had looked at other towers and only CalDigit offered a comparable product to support swapable drives in a port multiplier-aware case to keep cabling to a minimum. For SD and HD editing, there aren't too many choices.

For all the people having trouble out there with not all drives showing up, check the part and serial number. The H-serials, P/N ENC-SATA-D5P, the case only has an 80W supply and won't keep up with newer big drives. You'll need to contact Sonnet tech support to get your bay upgraded.



Potentially great NAS with a fatal flaw - poor design, July 13, 2009
By Prodigal Knot (Portland, OR)
I have purchased a half dozen NAS devices for SAN backups and most of them have been quite solid. For disaster recovery purposes, I have my SAN contents copied to two NAS units per volume for failover, with one set of NAS units always off-site.

This Sonnet looked like a good buy and I, too, was happy with the look. With five 750GB SATA hard drives mine is a 3TB solution using disk striping and keeping one drive as a spare. One issue with this unit is that, while it uses a multipath 3124 chip, Windows Server 2K-2003 and XP do not see the disks unless you make them 'Pass-Thru" objects. Thus, only on Windows Server can you implement software based RAID-5. On XP you are limited to disk striping or mirroring.

The biggest problem with this unit, however, is the cheap disk interface backplane Sonnet used. These disks are removable, but they shouldn't be since the connection to thebackplane is so 'iffy'. In fact, if I move this unit from one location to another I have to always re-seat one or more drives before the SATA card on the server or workstation can see it.

Once the unit is attached and the drives recognized, don't physically move the unit!! As long as this unti has a permanent spot to sit in, it seems to be quite stable. But, unless you are willing to play with the drives, popping them in and out until you get a good connection with the backplane, I would pass on this unit. Much more reliable units are the MicroNet SR4 (4TB) SATA units available for under $800. They can take a lot more handling because the drives are integral to the unit. This means if a drive fails you live with it or send the entire unit back for repair, but I've not see any issues with these, especially if you use RAID-5 with the SATRaid program included. An array on these units configured as RAID-5 is recognized by Windows Server as a single volume which is what you want.



Sent back for return, July 13, 2008
By Here in Small Town Ohio
bought this based on AMUG review. Returned quickly due to:

1) Drives being dropped, array rebuilt twice already in 3 days due to this. I have RAID/enterprise drives (WD 1TB drives) but still being dropped. Unstable.
2) Noise. Reviews had said this is quiet. I don't find it so at all. The rear fan is fairly quiet, but what you don't see is that it has a tiny internal fan for the power supply and that is very LOUD. I have this behind my desk, my Mac Pro with 4 HD is beneath my desk. I can barely hear my mac pro, this thing is WAY louder.

It's a nice looking piece of hardware, and maybe just doesn't do well with WD drives, but the noise issue is a dealbreaker even if the stability were better. For my use, I need rock solid stability, and this enclosure doesn't have it unfortunately.




This case is beautiful, but BEWARE, February 24, 2008
By L. Schrader
This is a beautiful enclosure, the best looking. I got caught up in the looks, and then after buying 4 of these, it became all to clear that they were all plagued with crashing and loosing volumes, and some times data all together. I really wanted them to work, even called tech support and basically found that they were only intended for 4 drives not 5, and they were buggy with 5 drives. I eventually sold or returned all the enclosures and used ugly cheaper enclosures from Ebay. My other products from Sonnet were as described, functioned, just these were not for me.