Addonics Storage Towers? Good/Bad?

[gaikokujinkyofusho]

I have been looking everywhere for reasonably cheap (cost wise) esata/usb, 4bay, RAID 1 storage solutions and while there are some undisputedly top notch options out there they seem to start at $500 on up and none seem to support 2tb internal drives.

I happened upon one post in the smallnetbuilder forums about Addonics (it is still hardly talked about on that forum). Their mini storage tower seems to be about the form factor I need, the $200 price range is ok and the option of integrated RAID 1, port multiplier, eSATA, and USB seems just about right. But I can hardly find any reviews about these storage towers.

So has anyone tried either the “Storage Tower” or the “Mini Storage Tower” from Addonics? I would be curious to know about any of the configurations, how they run especially the quality (parts etc did anything break prematurely).

Any comments or experiences shared would really be appreciated!

Cheers

-Gaiko

 

[ralphael]

Sorry I don't have experience with the addonnics, but I too have been searching the net on various esata raids and ended up buying the Mediasonic HFR2-S3B Pro RAID Box 4 Bay 3.5" SATA Drive RAID 0/1/3/5/10 Enclosure Black USB2.0 eSATA.

I've heard that this raid box will support the 2TB drives and definitely the 1.5TB drives. I'm currently using the 1TB WD green drives.

The reason that I went with mediasonic is that it didn't need a pci-e card of which I don't have a pci-e to spare. I just used my standard intel ICH9R esata port.

So far it has been working fine, with exception that my bios boots up with a reset port error and reports that the drive only has 748GB. After boot-up though, Windows has no problems in detecting that it is a 2.72TB drive.

Good luck on your search...