Which one of these RAID enclosures?

TahoeDust

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Nov 3, 2014
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I am going to be moving from my current 2 drive Raid 0 enclosure to a 4 drive enclosure that I can run Raid 5 in. This enclosure is used with my HTPC. I will be using 3TB drives. I have some Amazon gift cards so that is where I will be buying the enclosure. These two caught my eye because of price. One has the Raid hardware built in, the other comes with a raid card. Can you tell me which one of these would be recommended? Do you know of a better alternative through Amazon?

http://www.amazon.com/iview-3-5-Inch-Enclosure-IVIEW-HFR2-SU3/dp/B008U3FAHM/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1417418881&sr=8-5&keywords=raid+enclosure+4+bay

http://www.amazon.com/TowerRAID-TR4M-eSATA-Performance-Tower/dp/B004WNLOFQ/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1417418881&sr=8-6&keywords=raid+enclosure+4+bay
 
Solution
The Iview (round one) has the RAID card built in plus the USB 3.0 which is a nice extra (eSATA is sometimes problematic). The other looks to me like it's just got a SATA splitter to the drives which will be controlled by the included card. It might become a bottleneck on the system because each drive isn't directly connected to the controller.

Between the two, go with the first one.
The Iview (round one) has the RAID card built in plus the USB 3.0 which is a nice extra (eSATA is sometimes problematic). The other looks to me like it's just got a SATA splitter to the drives which will be controlled by the included card. It might become a bottleneck on the system because each drive isn't directly connected to the controller.

Between the two, go with the first one.
 
Solution