Comments on: Multi-bay eSATA enclosure

By: Shep

Shep — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 13:41:02 +0000

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!

By: Bibliophage

Bibliophage — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 03:31:48 +0000

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.

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 02:59:51 +0000

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!

By: Bibliophage

Bibliophage — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 01:44:43 +0000

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.

By: mkygod

mkygod — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 14:33:40 +0000

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.

By: D.Kwan

D.Kwan — Mon, 24 May 2010 14:18:12 +0000

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.

By: um

um — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 05:24:53 +0000

@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”.

By: D.Kwan

D.Kwan — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 03:36:07 +0000

Sorry, no idea. Hopefully someone can help.

By: skipsvideo

skipsvideo — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:46:00 +0000

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!

By: TedH

TedH — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 02:17:37 +0000

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…