Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Clean Up Your Storage Mess! — 4 Drive External Storage Box for $99”.
Hello and welcome to tech deals. External storage may not seem like an exciting topic. However, before you all run off, let me just say: well, okay, it isn’t all that exciting unless you’re trying to buy some storage and you can’t decide which way to go. Today’S video is brought to you by us in support of youtube premium. What is premium, it removes ads from youtube, allows background play on mobile devices, allows for easy downloads for offline watching and provides youtube music premium more details after the video. This is a media sonic.
4 drive external usb hard drive enclosure. It may seem fairly straightforward. However, this one is decked out with more features than you might think. First, let me say that they make multiple models of this unit, starting at just 100, for a basic model that holds four drives attached via usb or esata, and does exactly what you think it would. It provides four drives with data and power and a connection to your pc.
If you simply need to add some drives and either you want to use existing internal drives or you don’t like. The idea of four separate usb drives sitting on your desk with four separate power bricks and four separate cables to your computer. Then this is a solid choice for combining all that mess of cables. This unit, however, is far from just a drive bay with four drives in it. It’S effectively a mobile docking station for a laptop, an expansion for your computer and a data hub for your world, big words, but stay with me.
This thing does a lot more than just store drives. The connection to your pc is via a usb 3.1 gen2 10 gigabit per second cable, providing over one gigabyte per second of data transfer speeds plenty for reading and writing to even four drives at once. The same cable can also charge your laptop if it allows usb charging.
This provides 60 watts of power in addition to data. This makes for a very simple docking and power charging station for laptops that support this. The built-in sd card reader supports normal sd cards and micro sd cards, including uh s2 cards, with the extra row of pins for extra performance. On the back, we have an hdmi 2.0 extender output port, allowing you to connect a second monitor.
This follows with the charging feature to make this a solid desktop docking station for a laptop, as you can instantly have a second monitor, a desktop keyboard and mouse, a printer, a webcam and everything plugged into this ready to go just unplug, one cable from your laptop And you’ll be on the go in seconds and when you’re ready to dock it, plug that one cable back in and every device instantly connects with no fuss or mus. There are two more usb ports on the back, a type a and a type c. That’S what you’d connect those devices to keyboard, mouse, printers, etc or usb hub for further connections and then there’s another type, a port on the front for easy attachment of usb thumb drives or temporary devices.
This is so much more than just an external drive box. You really can’t have everything plugged into this. That’S all great you say, but how’s the performance. Great question glad you asked. In short, it’s exactly what you’d expect the same as if the drives were internal attached to sata ports.
Usb 3.0 introduced usap. It’S called the usb attached scuzzy protocol uasp, not exactly sure how to pronounce that which addressed the poor, hard drive performance over usb in short, internal or external, on a modern enclosure and a modern pc. There is effectively no performance difference between four drives here with usb and four drives internal all connected to sata. Having said that, i did test this unit using four western digital. Eight terabyte drives shocked from their elements external enclosures. Now these are cmr rather than smr drives.
So performance in single and multi-drive configurations is rather good. Single drive. Speed is exactly the same as it is when they were in their factory enclosure and the same as if you put them into an internal enclosure, putting them into raid 0 and raid 1 arrays again.
They worked absolutely fine with performance about, on par with setting up an internal rate array in windows. I then set up a raid 5 parity array using microsoft storage spaces. While i have my complaints with storage spaces, mostly due to the fact that it only allows a three column array through the gui, so you lose 33 percent of your drive space rather than 25 percent that you should lose with four drives. It does at least work fine and performance. Wasn’T that bad? You can manually set up a four column, raid 5 parity array via the powershell, but then you’re, diving rather deep into an expert level, subject that i wouldn’t suggest for casual users and, frankly, if you’re into that sort of thing you may find using this on linux And zfs, to be a wiser option to be 100 clear. You can do all of the above by just plugging the four western digital elements usb drives into four usb ports, plugging the four power bricks into a very large power strip, because they’re not small and get exactly the same effect. This just cleans it up, gives you some extra features and simplifies your installation. One other feature: this does support is built-in raid. However, it’s a poor implementation and i would not suggest using it.
It is raid 0 and raid 1. Only no raid 5 is built in. You also cannot build a single combined four drive array with it. Only two smaller two drive arrays.
I suspect this is due to the way the internal usb to static controller chip is set up inside. However, i haven’t taken it apart to confirm that and doing so wouldn’t change the outcome. So why bother skip it and do your raid in software? There is another reason to do. Raiden software raiden software is enclosure agnostic.
You can take the drives out, put them in something else, put them in a computer and still read your data whenever you use raid and enclosures like this, be it this or be it any other enclosure a lot of times. If you take the drives out of the enclosure, they’re not readable in anything else, so skip the built-in raid features and just use software raid. One last point: this enclosure uses usb type c and mediasonic says you must have a motherboard mounted type c: port, no adapters to type a ports and no expansion cards. Given all that this does, i would trust them on that.
The less expensive 99 dollar model without the extra features, hdmi expander, port and stuff uses usb 3.0 type, a for five gigabit per second transfers, and it will work on just about any pc from the past eight years. It also offers esata or external serial ata. However, that requires port replicator support and is a pain to use.
I know i’ve tried these support esata and it’s hit and miss use usb. It’S easier. Mediasonic provides a two year, warranty, which i have yet to need. As my existing eight drive bays work, just fine, i bought one of these new and one of them quote refurbished and, frankly, both of them looked brand new to me when i opened them up, so you may want to consider a refurbished model if they’re in stock I’Ll link to all of them in the video description below now, do i recommend media sonic enclosures? Yes, i do based on my three years of using these two eight drive bays based on the fairly straightforward hardware. That’S included the very simple setup. I found these to be a solid value for the money most of you watching.
This should consider the 99 dollar unit, not this one. If you just want to put drives on your machine for a hundred dollars, putting four drives into an enclosure, it’s the deal for most people. However, if you really want a usb 3.1 gen2, 10 gigabit per second usb type-c connection, they sell this for 139.
Without all the extra fluff that is on this top end model, which brings me to the price, the msrp on this unit here is two hundred and eighty dollars almost three times the price of the basic 99 dollar model. It’S nice. I can see the use for some people, however, unless you really want a desktop docking station for your laptop, preferably one that supports the usb charging feature. I suspect most of you don’t need all of this.
Just get the 99 unit and you’ll be good to go. Links to everything here and several different models of enclosures will be in the video description below those are affiliate links and using those supports the channel at no extra cost to you. This unit was provided to me by mediasonic as a review sample. However, my words are my own and they did not get an early review of this or any say in this review video i bought the two eight drive enclosures with my own money.
Three years ago, i bought the western digital drives with my own money and, frankly, one of the reasons why i even agreed to do an external enclosure. Video is because of my prior experience with closures that i bought with my own money, and so yes, it’s a sample, but i do like it and i do recommend it, and i will continue to use this in my own installation with the drives that i stuck In there youtube premium is, to put it simply awesome. We have been paying customers since the day it launched as youtube red a few years ago, and we have not seen an ad on youtube since we get it. No one actually likes ads, but we also love to watch our favorite content.
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One of the first links down there will be to all of my storage reviews. My three-year-old video, showing the setup of these eight drive bays the shocking of drives the actual unboxing and setup of this and a bunch of other storage videos. Of course, the affiliate links i mentioned before. It’S greatly appreciated if you use those to support the channel.
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