DS-1520N REF 3U 15-bay SATA Direct Attached Storage Array with Hardware RAID

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Price: $809.99   

Product Feature

• Fully hardware-accelerated RAID Engine, no RAID card needed
• Supports RAID levels 0 / 1 / 3 / 5 / 10 / JBOD / CLONE
• Supports up to fifteen 2TB or greater 3.5" SATA hard drives
• Supports on-line Auto-Rebuild at 200GB/hour
• Intelligent temperature and fan control for reducing fan noise

Product Description

The DS-1520 is a cost effective host dependent hardware RAID external SATA (eSATA) storage array. It comes built-in hardware RAID engine and Port Multipliers, supports both 1.5 Gb/s and 3Gb/s Serial ATA transfer rates.

Connected to the host system via eSATA ports, this subsystem gives your fast data transfer speed and massive hard drive space capability. The self-contained storage processor supports RAID 0, 1, 3, 5, 0+1, JBOD and CLONE functions.

The system can be connected to the host system's on-board SATA ports without a separate RAID controller. This advanced RAID feature enables the system to free up the host system CPU load which provides a protected, easy to manage, and cost effective storage solution.

DS-1520N REF 3U 15-bay SATA Direct Attached Storage Array with Hardware RAID Review

Overview

This is a great array for someone looking to expand their home storage network or possibly someone with a SOHO setup that needs plenty of storage. I used this array to combine many different drives I had laying around from past system builds as well as to give me a central place to go for over 15TB of storage.

Unpacking

The array arrived well packed with two layers of boxes and internal Styrofoam.

Installation

You will definitely want to buy the optional rackmount mounting rails. The railkit costs approximately $32 more but was worth not having to sit the array on top of another rackmount device. There is no way the front brackets will hold the weight of the array empty let alone full of hard drives.

Hardware

All hardware was included. eSATA cables, SATA cables, power cables, drive trays, and drive tray mounting screws were included. The chassis is reasonably high quality metal, and I believe the power supply is a standard ATX power supply which is always preferred over some custom form factor so that if the OE PS dies you can get another one from anywhere. The array has plenty of fans, so far I have 12 drives in the array and no cooling issues.

The array is surprisingly quiet even when fully populated with WD Caviar Greens. The fans are barely noticeable to include the power supply fan. The indicator lights on the front are sparse but do provide basic information such as which drive bays are filled, which drives are active, and which internal RAID controller is active. A nice to have would have been a LCD screen with temp and other environmental info but at this price point its not surprising that its lacking.

One HW feature that I found totally cool was that you can bring your own eSATA port multiplying RAID controller card if you wanted, disable the RAID controller in the array, and use all of your own features with your own RAID controller card.

Software

The CD that came with mine was useless, trying to read it locked up two different laptops so I ended up downloading the latest software right from their website. The GUI interface for their drives and software is terrible, incredibly cheesy, and felt like something developed in the 90's, but it did install without a hitch and instantly recognized the attached array. Configuration of the RAID went without a hitch.

I did all of my configurations from a server running Windows Server 8 BETA x64 so I can say its not only Windows Server 8 BETA compatible its also 64bit compatible driver software.

A nice feature is that the HD's SMART monitoring information is available via the array's driver software.

Features

The amount of storage options this unit provides is awesome. I was looking for a budget eSATA rackmount enclosure with at least 8 drive bays and this unit definitely performs above and beyond my expectations. It offers all the usual RAID levels but the best part is that internally it is comprised of 3 separate RAID controllers which are accessible via 3 separate eSATA ports on the back so if you wanted to you could connect 3 different servers to this array. Also, if you choose to connect a device to the array that does not have a port multiplier eSATA port, you can configure the internal controller of the array to do the port multiplication for you and present a single logical storage volume to the connected device.

During my burn-in testing of my 2TB WDC Green RAID array I saw sustained writes of approximately 86MB/s and reads of approximately 98MB/s for a RAID 5 array of 4 1TB WDC Greens.

The Bad

The only bad thing about this array is the incredibly cheap hard drive carriages. You have to be very careful when mounting, inserting, or removing hard drives from this array. The carriages are very fragile, thin, plastic and will easily crack or break if handled roughly. Once the drives are properly inserted into the array you should be ok.

Conclusion

This is a great budget minded eSATA RAID enclosure for anyone seeking a ton of drive bays, HW RAID controllers, and storage flexibilty for less than $1000.00. It certainly is not enterprise class, but then again, neither is the price.

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