Startech InfoSafe 4x 3.5″ (RAID) External Hard Drive Enclosure Review

1. Introduction2. The Startech InfoSafe Enclosure3. Software and Installation4. Performance5. Closing Thoughts6. View All Pages

External hard drives have grown in popularity in the last year, allowing users to expand storage capacity with minimal effort and at a very low cost.  The external solution is ideal for ‘offline' data backup or to share media and data files quickly across multiple machines.

Today we are going to look at one of Startech's external hard drive enclosures which has room for four 3.5″ SATA hard drives in a RAID configuration.  This is designed specifically for corporate users so it uses the royalty free eSATA interface exclusively rather than USB3.0.  As numerous corporate users only upgrade their PC systems every few years, Startech includes an eSATA expansion card with the InfoSafe which can be installed into a PCI slot.

Specification

• Model Number: SAT3540ER2
• Enclosure Type: Aluminium
• Number of Drives: 4
• Compatible Drives: 3.5″ SATA
• Max Drive Capacity: Tested up to 2.0GB
• Supported RAID Modes: BIG, CLONE, JBOD, RAID0, RAID1, RAID10, RAID5
• Fans: 1x 80mm
• Dimensions: 170 x 230 x 149 mm (W x L x H)
• Host Connector: 7-pin eSATA DATA Male

The InfoSafe's packaging doesn't exactly infuse us with excitement as Startech have opted for a simple plain white box which is decorated only by a description of the contents.  The box does seem very robust, though and there is also foam padding to provide an extra level of protection for the enclosure inside.

Startech include a plentiful selection of accessories within the box which include a power supply, an eSATA cable, and a software CD.  They also include power leads for Europe and the USA along with the standard UK adapter.  We also find a PCI Express x1 eSATA card for those who don't have one built into their machine.

It's clear that Startech have opted for functionality rather than concentrating on the aesthetics of the enclosure.  The front of the unit contains four drive bays which can be easily ejected using the buttons on each bay.  To give the enclosure a little substance, they have used aluminum for the top, bottom and sides of the unit which should prove durable in the long run.  This does add significantly to the weight which is 3.4kg in total, but it's form factor doesn't exactly lend itself well to portability anyway considering it measures 170 x 230 x 149 mm.

To the right of the four drive bays we find the power button accompanied by five LED indicators.  The front doesn't carry any Startech branding.  In fact the only branding on the unit is located on the right hand side of the enclosure, consisting of a small Startech.com logo and an InfoSafe logo in the top left corner.  Around the rear of the machine there is an 80mm fan vent, a DC input, an eSATA connection, a reset button and a fan on / off switch.

We found the fan noise from the enclosure quite intrusive during operation so having the ability to turn the fan off is very important in our opinion.  It would have been nice, however, if Startech had opted for a higher quality, quieter fan that is more tolerable for extended periods of usage.

The enclosure's power supply also has a small fan inside which can be a little annoying if you plan to use it in a quiet environment.  Overall, the noise of the InfoSafe makes it quite inappropriate for media storage as the fan emissions are louder than they should be.

Startech say the InfoSafe supports up to 8TB of storage, comprising of four 2TB SATA drives.  There is a possibility that you could achieve 12TB of storage using four 3TB drives but this hasn't been tested by Startech and we don't have the drives at hand to test this ourselves.

Startech are using the JMicron JMB393 SATA RAID controller in the InfoSafe alongside a Silicon Image SIL3531.  The unit supports all the RAID options we could possibly require including JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks), meaning you can use disks of differing sizes as a single volume.

Startech have made the installation of drives into the enclosure a reasonably simple process.  The first step requires us to remove the bays from the enclosure and unscrew the black plastic piece in the end to make room for the hard drives.  The screws removed in this part of the process can then be used to fix the hard drive into the tray.

Once all the hard drives have been installed into the trays, they can be inserted back into the enclosure.  The trays are a tool-less design, meaning they can easily be removed and inserted when required.  We installed two Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB (7,200rpm) hard drives into the InfoSafe for our testing procedure.

When you have all the drives installed correctly into the enclosure, the JMicron driver has to be installed for setup.  This can be found on the software CD included in the bundle.  For those who don't require the RAID functionality of the InfoSafe, there is no need to install the bundled software.  The first page of the software contains a breakdown of the drives installed in the enclosure.

The software provides an easy interface to configure a number of different RAID arrays using the drives installed into the enclosure.  We configured our two Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB (7,200rpm) hard drives in a RAID 0 array and formatted the volume using the NTFS file structure.

Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0 x64.

The CrystalMark results are about what we would expect for an eSATA enclosure.  The Sequential results are the most impressive, rivaling a number of SSDs out there.

We have been using HDTach for many years now and always find it is an invaluable benchmark to ascertain potential levels of performance. HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible.

Our HDTach test showed an average speed of 198.1 Mb/s which should translate into some fast real world transfer speeds.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

Another impressive set of results for the InfoSafe – we look forward to seeing how it performs in our real world tests.

For our real world tests we used a single 2.09GB .AVI file and a mixed file folder making up 2.64GB altogether.  In the test we copied these to and from the RAID volume.  Our test system featured a Corsair F40 Solid State drive connected to one of our motherboard's SATA 6Gbps ports.

The Startech enclosure performed well in our real world tests, re-enforcing the strong results from the synthetic benchmarks we performed.

It's clear to us that the Startech InfoSafe is perfect for those who need to back up large volumes of data reasonably frequently but aren't looking for a storage system that is going to be used every day.  This is because the enclosure is very noisy in operation due to a lack of noise suppression and poor choice of fan.

For most people, a single-drive external hard drive will provide more than enough space for backing up data so we can only really see the InfoSafe being used in corporate environments.  For those who want a large storage device for media, a NAS server would probably be more appropriate as the storage can be shared easily between multiple machines and most models will run more quietly.

The build quality of the InfoSafe is top notch and we have no doubt that it will last a very long time if treated properly.  Even though the fan is noisy in operation, its cooling will improve the longevity of the hard drives installed.  We still question the need for a small, annoyingly noisy fan in the power supply, though, as we have tested gaming laptops in the past with much higher rated power supplies that don't require a fan for cooling.

At a price of around £130 at Ebuyer, the InfoSafe will be a little expensive for the average consumer, especially when you consider the price of four drives on top of this.  But for corporate users, backing up data is essential and most companies will pay this price for an easy backup solution.  This device would also be appropriate for those who want to access a number of hard drives at the same time without resorting to multiple connections.

Pros:

• Good raid performance
• built to last
• ideal for office or corporate backup
  

Cons:

• noisy
• no need for a fan in the power supply
  
• design isn't pretty
  

KitGuru says: A good performance unit, if you can deal with the fan noise.

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