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
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.
Hi Daniel,
Enjoyed your post on the Venus unit. Sorry about the fans. Have you considered swapping out the fans for something quieter? (See e.g., http://www.silentpcreview.com/article63-page2.html Or do you think that that would be difficult given the construction of the Venus?
I am searching in vain for something similar for 2–5 drives that is QUIET.
Mike
Hi Mike, sorry for the slow reply. The fans do look like they’d be easy to swap out but I didn’t try it. Here’s a pic. Hope that helps. Looks like they should come out easily.
Thanks, Daniel. That does help.
Where are all the front ventilation holes located? I only see a thin horizontal slit thats integrated on the bay door handles.
Is that enough to feed fresh air air into the case? It looks like it needs more vents.
Yeah those are pretty much it. The sides and top of the unit are removable panels so I guess you could open them up for a little more air. I’ll take some pics later.
Ok Ben I’ve posted pics here. But really though, when I copied stuff for hours the unit didn’t even get warm, so I don’t think there should be any heat issues.
I now have 3 of these enclosures running on a Windows (sorry! :) PC in my study. So as you might imagine having all 3 running at the same time creates a lot of fan noise, even with the speed set at low. So I thought I’d replace the fans and ordered myself 6 Scythe Kama Flow 80mm fans. But when I went to do the installation on the first of my 3 DS2350 enclosures I ran into 2 problems.
1) The original fans are 20mm thick whereas the Scythes are 25mm. That creates a very tight fit in the enclosure and the fan connectors actually interfere with one of the fans. Might have to cut off one corner of the fan case to get it to fit, or possibly mount the fans on the exterior of the enclosure (not the best look).
2) Just when I decided I could make the 25mm thickness work I discovered that the fan connectors on the OEM fans are NOT the same as the 3-pin connector on the Scythe (or other) case fans. That was a show stopper for me the other evening. So to make it work I’ll have to cut/solder the original connectors to the Scythe fans or possibly try moving the connector sleeves from the Scythe 3-pin molded connector to the OEM connector.
Just a heads up if you’re considering replacing the fans in one of these enclosures. Other than the fan noise I’m reasonably satisfied with these boxes, especially for the price.
Kevin, thanks for the info. It’s disappointing that enclosure mfgrs think noise doesn’t matter — and also that they use oddball fans and connectors! I changed the 40mm fan in my smaller external case (Sans Digital MobileSTOR MS2UT+) It was quite a disassembly job, & then I had to solder their oddball connector onto the new fan. The unit works fine but gives error messages occasionally — possibly because I replaced a 3-wire fan with a 2-wire one. The ironic thing is, the Sythe fan cost me $5 at retail! It would have cost them nothing to design the unit with a quieter fan!
Thanks for that info Kevin.
I have one of these and the sound is a little bothersome. Kevin I think it is cool that you modified your t5. I want to do the same. So a 20mm fan with which type of connector do you think would work? I do not know a thing about fans so any help is greatly appreciated.
Also did anyone think that the esata express card runs a little hot?
I also have had a T5 for about 1.5 months using with Vista x64. Very easy to set up but I’ve had a couple of issues since. Twice it has stopped working. The included software will talk to it and it see’s the drives but Vista only see’s one and it has a communication error. The first time I reseated each drive and monkey’d around with it and it up and started working again.
A couple days ago it did it again. This time it was much more difficult to get working again. I tried all the latest drivers, bios updates on the Sil card, etc. Long story short I had to flash the bios in the 4726 manager (the T5 itself) with the same version that was in it and bada-bing she started working again. The only other thing I will say is that I do turn it off at night as the cost of electricity in CA is very high. I.e. with my current tiered rate it costs over $500/year if I left it running 24x7. That is based on actual wattage and not nameplate…
I know this thread is over a year old, but I have some new light to shine on the subject about the venus t-5. I read all the reviews and such and decided for me, it was a great solution for just backing up my internal RAID config in my Mac Pro. However, by the time I bought it and it arrived I had updated to 10.6 (now running 10.6.2) and at first all was fine.
I set it up and had a few kernel panics until I tracked down the most current driver for SIL-3132 chipset on my eSATA card. fixed. Then, the SIL-4726 manager was easy enough to configure a RAID then disk utility read it as a single drive. Formatted it, voila! all was good. Then I backed up all the data to the new RAID.
Next came the problems. I built the RAID using only 3 drives, so I have 2 open bays in the T-5. I added another drive, then used 4726 manager to configure it, disk utility saw, it and formatted fine. After a restart, they no longer mount. Now I’m stuck with all the data on the t-5 but unable to mount it anymore.
If you (Daniel) or anyone else has any experience here I’d like some advice. Thanks!
Sorry, no idea. Hopefully someone can help.
@skipvideo: did you say formatted? Raids only need to initialize the added disk/drive and expand the array, based on the number “3” i assume you mean raid 5. Dont know if sil / steelvine support online capacity expansion/migration but when you say format, usally means you erased your data. try removing the new drive, then rebuild the array you had before exact spec including raid stripe/chunk size (probably default) and see if your data returns if not try some simple undelete tool/program . Good luck. PS: if your letting the readers know that if you plan on adding drives as time goes on, raid 0,5 is not recommended Good for you. raid 1 for any number of drives should be fine as well as 10 for even number. And of course JBOD, Single. “smile”.
Warning: SiI 3132 has an updated Mac driver, version 1.2.3.0, but after I installed it my T5 drives wouldn’t mount. Reverted to version 1.1.11 but the drives still won’t mount. I can’t figure it out. Gonna move my disks to another box and hope that the JBOD setups remain intact.
I’ve had this unit for over a year. Worked well in Windows XP, but not well for Windows 7 under JBOD. It would work normally, but if you swap the bays or turn the unit on and off again whil in Windows, the OS won’t recognize the drives until you restart WIndows again.
Weird thing is that the SATA card sees that the drives are there, but the drive letters will not show up or be detected in device manager. I’m guessing its a driver issue.
Just so you know, the reason you get those error messages is that Windows does not know that ESATA is a removable drive. Instead, it’s a internal, non-removable drive. I just spent two days using a Linux machine to recover the security setting corrupted files off of a customer ESATA external drive.
If you want to be _sure_ it doesn’t explode, open Disk Manager, and set the drive to ‘offline’. Then, when you plug it in later, set it to ‘online’ again. Yes, it’s an extra step, but it makes sure that everything is flushed to the drive before removal. They’re really not intended for removable storage — rather, permanent external storage.
Interesting comment and something I, for one, had not realized, though I have seen those issues. The latest external drives have USB3, which (in theory, anyway) is faster than eSATA and is handled properly by Windows as a removable drive. A big improvement!
The customer in question has found better performance with esata than USB3. Mind you, that’s one person’s actual experience, not the theoretical 4.8Gbps that USB3 can produce. What people aren’t realizing is that 1) the hard drives in question will rarely have SATA III (6Gbps) drives in them, so the internal USB drives are limited to the 3Gpbs of SATA II, and 2) there is overhead involved in the USB transaction itself. So a direct hard drive to hard drive link, such as ESATA is likely going to give slightly better performance. That said, the hot plugging is going to be the most beneficial thing. Actually being able to hit ‘remove this device’ without a production.
TedH said…
“A couple days ago it did it again. This time it was much more difficult to get working again. I tried all the latest drivers, bios updates on the Sil card, etc. Long story short I had to flash the bios in the 4726 manager (the T5 itself) with the same version that was in it and bada-bing she started working again.”
Turns out that this fixed one of our T5 boxes that we thought had died. We used the v12052 fw version, which was the same version that SIManager reported was already installed. Didn’t even have to reboot, and all drives then showed up.
Thank you so much!