The Adventures of Daniel Kwan

SATA connectors inside the AMS Venus T5

As I mentioned before (here and here), I got an eSATA 5-bay external hard drive enclosure to replace my existing FireWire enclosures, and to house a backup. It’s called an AMS Venus T5 DS-2350S, a name that means nothing to me, but it’s relatively cheap and the reviews for it on Newegg are pretty good – mostly 4 out of 5.

I went from this mess:

to this box just slightly bigger than a 2-slice toaster:

It comes with everything, except an eSATA ExpressCard for laptops. For desktops it comes with a 2-port eSATA PCI-E controller.

hard disk tray

screws included *

lever to help move disk into SATA connectors

I don’t know what the included Windows software is for, but on a Mac, you just set up the disks the same way you set up any disk through Disk Utility. To make RAID or JBOD sets, go into the RAID menu. There you can choose to create a Mirrored RAID Set (RAID 1), Striped RAID Set (RAID 0), or Concatenated Disk Set (JBOD).

Mac OS X Disk Utility

If you don’t know what RAID is, you can google it or just don’t worry about it. I think most people won’t ever need it. JBOD on the other hand is simple. It’s Just a Bunch Of Disks that together make one drive. I use two JBOD volumes in my setup and use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup one volume to the other.

Carbon Copy Cloner

Why not Drobo?

The Venus T5 took me a total of maybe 15 minutes to get up and running, and that’s because I’m slow. There’s really nothing to it. You screw the trays onto the disks, insert the disks, plug in everything and format the disks. I suppose Drobo saves you a few minutes since you just insert the disks and it does the rest, but Drobo is $500 and this Venus T5 was $210 (price went up since I got it).

Drobo protects your data in case of a disk failure. That’s a good feature only for people who don’t do backups. If you do regular backups, you’re already protected from disk failure. The price difference between these two enclosures can get you a 1 TB hard disk to backup everything.

And of course, the thing that boggles the mind, Drobo uses USB interface only. I mean, seriously? The thing holds four hard disks and transfers data through USB. USB slow. FireWire fast. eSATA fastest. T5 FTW!

Issues

It’s not perfect though. Every time I plug in the T5 (sounds like a Terminator name), these annoying messages pop up:

Disk Insertion (screenshot)
The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.

Device Removal (screenshot)
The device you removed was not properly put away. Data might have been lost or damaged. Blah blah blah.

I just click on Ignore and OK, or let the messages go away by themselves after a few seconds. They seem to be false alarms because the drives show up and work just fine, and I didn’t remove any devices.

I bet they have to do with my JBOD setups. Maybe when I turn on the enclosure, the computer sees five disks which aren’t usable, hence “not readable”. And then they disappear because they’re actually JBOD sets, so the computer thinks they were removed. Just guessing though, I really have no idea.

Another complaint I have is that the fans are frikkin loud! They don’t change speeds depending on the temperature. There’s just a switch on the back with a low and high setting, and they’re loud and louder.

They could have made the low setting lower. Even after transfering data for hours, the box stays totally cool. When it’s summertime I’m gonna turn the thing around and point the fans my way.

Final thoughts

Honestly I ended up with the T5 because I was considering getting a Drobo, which has been mentioned in numerous prominent photography websites. Then I started reading about problems with Drobo, such as speed, proprietary file system, and not accepting hard drives that are perfectly fine. Just look through it’s own forums.

So I went looking for an alternative that’s compact and uses FireWire. Well it turns out FireWire enclosures are generally more expensive than eSATA enclosures, so I went with eSATA which is faster anyway.

I’ve only been using the T5 for a couple days but so far so good. I read about people having eSATA problems with OS X 10.5 Leopard, even with the latest version 10.5.2, but someone somewhere (discussions.apple.com I believe) mentioned that there’s only problems when the enclosure uses eSATA plus another interface, like USB. The T5 is eSATA only, and aside from those messages popping up, I haven’t had any problems.

* In the photo of the hard disk with the tray attached, I used the round head screws that came with the disk instead of the flat head ones that came with the Venus T5. You have to use flat head screws or the disks won’t fit in the enclosure.

Related posts:

1. Moving 1 TB to eSATA drives
2. More pics of AMS Venus T5
3. October 27 photos

Tags: AMS Venus T5, Apple, Carbon Copy Cloner, Drobo, external multi-bay enclosure, link, photography, work

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 3:56 pm and is filed under Equipment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.