 Home Members Only Membership Donations Reviews Store Mail List Legal  |
||
Four Bay SATA Enclosure
A review of the Addonics Disk Array 4SA Enclosure used with a PowerMac G5
By Arthur Whalem
Addonics is shipping the Disk Array 4SA (AE4RCS35NSA) $119 external four bay SATA hard drive enclosure kit that allows you to mount up to four SATA drives using an SATA host adapter. While the Disk Array 4SA is designed to work internally in a PC, it can also be utilized externally with two external power supplies (AADCPAC12V $25 each). As a result, the enclosure can be used with a Power Macintosh with an SATA host adapter card. The Disk Array 4SA comes with unshielded SATA cables for internal use in a PC. For external usage of this enclosure shielded SATA cables are recommended. Addonics sells them for $13.99 each (AASAEDC3F). When you add up the cost of the Disk Array 4SA $119, two external power supplies at $25 each and four shielded external SATA cables the total cost is about $229.
During this review, an Apple PowerMac G5 2.0GHz dual with a SeriTek/1VE4 Four-Port external SATA host adapter installed in the PCI slot was utilized with the Addonics Disk Array 4SA. This article will examine how the Disk Array 4SA performs when used with an Apple PowerMac.
System Requirements
Requires 3.5" SATA hard drives.
Requires an SATA PCI host adapter with external ports.
Requires two external power supplies (AADCPAC12V) for external use.
Optional shielded SATA cables are recommended (AASAEDC3F).
Supports large drives over 137GB.
Install
The four bay Addonics Disk Array 4SA comes with four drive drawer trays (AA4RCSDR) shown at the right. You mount your SATA hard drives in these trays with the hard drive connectors pointed toward the rear of the tray and the top of the drive facing up. Screws are provided with the Disk Array 4SA enclosure for attaching your hard drives to the four screw holes in the bottom of the drive drawer trays. These trays easily slide in and out of the Disk Array 4SA when inserting or removing hard drives from this enclosure. When using the FirmTek SeriTek/1VE4 Four-Port external SATA host adapter with the Addonics Disk Array 4SA enclosure you will find that hot swap drive capability is supported. You can dismount drives on the Macintosh and remove the drive tray and replace it with another drive without having to restart the computer. You can purchase additional drive drawer trays (AA4RCSDR) for $14.95 each if you want to enhance your drive swapping capabilities. When using the 4SA with a FirmTek SATA card you will also be able to boot from any of the SATA hard drives in the enclosure that have a bootable system. When you slide the tray into the 4SA it clicks in to place as the lid closes and the backplane connection is secured. Pushing the release button on the left side releases the drive so that it can be removed. Mounting and dismounting hard drives with the Disk Array 4SA enclosure is very easy.
Backplane Mounting
The Addonics Disk Array 4SA enclosure uses a backplane drive mounting system. The connection on the back of your SATA hard drive physically plugs into the SATA board connector inside the enclosure. In the image below all of the trays are removed so that you can see the Disk Array 4SA enclosure internal hard drive connectors. The four solder connections on the left side are where the rear SATA connectors are mounted. Immediately behind the mounting board is a large 80x80x20mm fan module that provides cooling to the SATA hard drives mounted in the Disk Array 4SA enclosure. The grooves on the side of the enclosure are used to guide the drive trays into the proper position.
4SA Rear Configuration
On the left side of the image below you can see two external power supplies (AADCPAC12V) that are connected to provide power for up to four drives in the 4SA. You can also use the (AASAPS) SATA power supplies but I found the 4 pin molex connection supplied by the AADCPAC12V to be more secure. One external power supply will power up to two drives, but why have a four bay enclosure without the ability to power hard drives in all four bays? On the rear right side of the Addonics Disk Array 4SA enclosure you will find four SATA cable connections that are mounted vertically. This is where your external shielded SATA cables (AASAEDC3F) will be connected to the enclosure. The other end will be attached to the SATA host adapter card mounted in the PowerMac.
The AADCPAC12V provides an external power supply with a 4 pin molex connection. I can see lots of uses for these $25 power supply adapters. With an AADCPAC12V you can power any enclosure, hard drive, DVR or other gadget that was originally designed for internal PC use.
The Addonics Disk Array 4SA enclosure has a temperature and a fan failure alarm. The alarm uses an audio pulse and the front fan light turns red instead of the normal green light. In the upper left of the image above there is a jumper that allows you to set the temperature at which the alarm goes off. You can select 55, 60 or 65 degrees Celsius by moving the jumper. The unit tested was set at 60 which is equal to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. I moved the jumper to 55 but found that without small needle nose pliers it was difficult to change the jumper configuration. Most users will find the preset 60 setting sufficient. I heated up the enclosure to hear the alarm. It has a good volume and can be heard easily from a distance of 25 feet.
Front Access
Once you mount each SATA drive in a tray and slide all of the trays into the Addonics Disk Array 4SA enclosure and turn it on, it will look like the image above. On the right side of each drive bay is an on/off switch that allows you to determine which drives will be utilized. When the bay is on it has a green light as shown above. This is a nice feature if you have four drives installed in the Addonics Disk Array 4SA enclosure but only need to use one or two drives at a time. This can save drive wear and tear by only powering up the hard drives needed and can also lower electricity usage. I am not aware of any other four bay enclosure that has the ability for the user to decide which bays will be turned on. Usually there is one switch that turns on all hard drives mounted in the enclosure, whether you need them all or not. This may leave hard drives running that are not needed at the moment. The user usually accepts this fact or has to remove the drives from the enclosure. When your enclosure has more than two hard drive bays individual on/off switches can be a very nice feature.
In the image above you will also find a RESET button at the top right, for use if an alarm is activated. On the left side of each tray latch you can see the open switch that can be locked by turning the plastic knob. Hard drives slide in easily and make a nice latching sound when the front tray lever is pushed into the closed position.
Cooling
The Addonics Disk Array 4SA enclosure has a powerful 80x 80x 20mm (8 cm) fan mounted on the rear of the enclosure. The fan is rated at 3000RPM and can move up to 35.45 cubic feet per minute (CFM). As a test, I placed a Seagate 300GB, Seagate 160GB and a Maxtor 300 SATA drive in the 4SA enclosure and let them run for 14 hours. I used Hardware Monitor 1.5 to display the temperature of the Seagate drives using their internal smart drive sensors. This test displayed the heat generated by three large drives running continuously in the 4SA enclosure. After 14 hours the Seagate 300GB SATA reported 104 degrees Fahrenheit and the Seagate 160GB reported 107.6 degrees Fahrenheit. This is a very low reading when you consider the three drives are basically mounted on top of each other inside a small box.
As a comparison, the same Seagate 160 and 300 SATA drives were placed in my favorite two bay enclosure, the FirmTek SeriTek/1EN2 and tested for the same period of time. The Seagate 300 reported 114.8 degrees and the Seagate 160 displayed 116.6 degrees Fahrenheit. As these drives are rated to operate at temperatures of up to 131 degrees Fahrenheit the FirmTek SeriTek/1EN2 is well within the appropriate range and it is an awesome enclosure. However, the Addonics Disk Array 4SA cooling system was able to keep the drives almost 10 degrees cooler. It is interesting to note that when the hard drives were heavily utilized for hours while backing up 140GB of data using Retrospect, the drives in the 4SA enclosure stayed about 10 degrees cooler than the same drives mounted in the 1EN2 enclosure performing the same task. The large 80x 80x 20mm fan on the 4SA enclosure and the aluminum trays provide exceptional cooling capability for this four bay enclosure.Acoustics
While the Addonics Disk Array 4SA enclosure has wonderful cooling capabilities, I found it quite a bit louder than the FirmTek SeriTek/1EN2 enclosure. I do not have a sound level meter but when sitting within 5 feet of the 1EN2 while in operation I can hear it as a slight background noise with the PowerMac G5 being louder. In the case of the Addonics Disk Array 4SA I find it can be louder than the PowerMac G5 in the same situation. The noise generated by the 4SA enclosure can become tiresome if located close to you while computing for long periods of time. On the other hand, air conditioning fans or music playing will usually mask most of the 4SA fan noise. Either way, I would not classify the 4SA as quiet, while in operation. The 4SA is much louder than the 1EN2 but that is not unexpected based on the cooling tests.
Sleep
When using sleep mode with a Macintosh the Addonics Disk Array 4SA enclosure fan and drives continue to run. In contrast, the SeriTek/1EN2 goes one step further by leaving the fan on but idling the drives while in sleep mode. Because of this and its quieter design the SeriTek/1EN2 enclosure is much quieter when the Macintosh is in sleep mode than the Addonics Disk Array 4SA. Both enclosures recover from sleep without any problems but the ability of the 1EN2 to idle the drives is a nice feature. As FirmTek designs specifically for Macintosh use and the 4SA is primarily a PC product it is understandable that the 1EN2 will have some features the 4SA does not support. If you use sleep mode often you may prefer the SeriTek/1EN2.
PowerMac G5 2.0GHz Dual Test #1The SeriTek/1VE4 Four-Port external SATA host adapter was used with the Addonics Disk Array 4SA enclosure in all of the performance tests that follow. I like the FirmTek host adapter cards as they are bootable and are designed to work well with the PowerMac. The FirmTek SeriTek/1EN2 dual bay enclosure is designed to perform with the FirmTek host adapters. My performance tests with the Addonics Disk Array 4SA enclosure will be to see how well it will perform compared to the SeriTek/1EN2. If the 4SA can perform as well as the 1EN2, it may provide another option for Macintosh external SATA usage.
The Addonics Disk Array 4SA enclosure and the FirmTek SeriTek/1EN2 enclosures were each tested with a dual Maxtor 300GB striped RAID installed, while using a SeriTek/1VE4 host adapter on a PowerMac G5 2.0GHz Dual with 3GB of memory and Mac OS X 10.4.2. Drive Genius 1.1.1 was used to benchmark the performance. A new RAID was created once the drives were installed in each enclosure just in case reformatting for a specific enclosure made a difference in performance. In the images below the green bars are the 1EN2 enclosure with the Maxtor 300GB dual RAID and the blue bars are the 4SA enclosure with the same Maxtor 300 RAID.
Sustained Read
Green = 1EN2 with Maxtor 300 dual RAID. Blue = 4SA with Maxtor 300 dual RAID.
Looking at the Sustained Read chart above there is not much of a performance difference between the two enclosures.
Sustained Write
Green = 1EN2 with Maxtor 300 dual RAID. Blue = 4SA with Maxtor 300 dual RAID.
In the Sustained Write graph above the 1EN2 and the 4SA enclosures perform very closely.
Random Read
Green = 1EN2 with Maxtor 300 dual RAID. Blue = 4SA with Maxtor 300 dual RAID.
In the Random Read results above the two enclosures seem to alternate outperforming each other. When it is all done there does not appear to be a significant difference in overall performance between the two units.
Random Write
Green = 1EN2 with Maxtor 300 dual RAID. Blue = 4SA with Maxtor 300 dual RAID.
In the Random Write test above the 1EN2 appears to outperform the 4SA in a few areas but this may not be noticable in real time usage. Based on the overall Drive Genius 1.1.1 benchmark tests I would expect both enclosures to have similar performance.
PowerMac G5 2.0GHz Dual Test #2In order to see how the benchmark results above compare with other disk activities a number of disk intensive functions were recorded with the same PowerMac G5 2.0GHz Dual. Tests performed include copying 4.25GB to the hard drive, Duplicating 4.25GB, Xbench scores and Disktester results. The 300GB Maxtor dual RAID was tested in both the 1EN2 and the 4SA. The drives were installed in each enclosure, erased and a new RAID was created for these tests. Energy Saver was set to highest. In each test, only the enclosures are different. The drives, PowerMac and 1VE4 host adapter card are all identical.
| 558GB RAID Activity | SeriTek/1EN2 | Disk Array 4SA |
| Copy 4.25GB to Maxtor RAID | 1:09 minutes | 1:08 minutes |
| Duplicate 4.25GB | 1:12 minutes | 1:12 minutes |
| Xbench Drive score | 244 | 246 |
| Xbench Overall Score | 246 | 247 |
| Disktester Sequential write MB/sec | 138 | 138.7 |
| Disktester Sequential read MB/sec | 116.9 | 117.4 |
| Disktester random write MB/sec | 13.7 | 14.3 |
| Disktester random read MB/sec | 20.9 | 20.9 |
In the tests above, the copy and duplicate times are very close. The Xbench scores are also very close in performance. Disktester is a terminal application written by Lloyd Chambers of digLloyd, Inc. This tool was used to capture the MB/second transfer rates of each enclosure. The transfer size used for the sequential tests was 32768K. The transfer size used for the random tests was 4K. The random read test was identical on both enclosures, while the 4SA was able to edge ahead on the other Disktester results. Both of these enclosures perform wonderfully and in normal usage situations I find no remarkable performance differences between them based on these tests. It is clear, that the 4SA is able to keep up with the performance of the 1EN2 dual bay enclosure when using the FirmTek 1VE4 SATA host adapter.
Using the 4SA with the 1VE4
While the Addonics Disk Array 4SA works very well with the FirmTek SeriTek/1VE4 Four-Port external SATA host adapter, there is an issue you should know about. The 4SA has the ability to turn on/off power to any of the four drive bays. This is not a feature that the 1VE4 is programmed to understand. If you leave all four bays powered up you will never experience a problem. You can hot swap drives all day while the computer is running and never miss a beat. However, if you dismount a drive(s) and turn the bay(s) off while the PowerMac is running and then later turn the bay(s) back on and insert a drive(s) without restarting you may have to hot swap the drive(s) twice before it is recognized. This is not a big issue. A restart also fixes the problem. If I want the four bay 4SA to work as a two or three bay enclosure it is usually for an extended period of time and a restart is very easy. It is nice to have the ability to turn individual bay power off, but it may confuse the 1VE4 host adapter if it is not accompanied with a restart. Hot swapping twice has always fixed this issue too. The ability to power down individual bays is well worth this minor quirk. Maybe a future 1VE4 firmware update will fix this. FirmTek is always making their products better and better.
ThoughtsThere are some advantages to having a four bay SATA enclosure that can power off individual bays. I do not know of any other SATA four bay enclosure that has this feature. It can reduce heat, save electricity and reduce drive wear. I really like being able to control which SATA drives will power up without having to remove drives. In addition, the SeriTek/1VE4 capability to boot and provide hot swap hard drive services with the Addonics Disk Array 4SA enclosure on the PowerMac is very nice. At $229 for all of the shielded cables, power supplies and the enclosure, the Addonics Disk Array 4SA is the least expensive four bay SATA enclosure for the PowerMac that I have seen. It also has excellent performance. The only distracting 4SA issue is that the enclosure is louder than the PowerMac G5. However, when you add up all of the features that the Disk Array 4SA provides at a very reasonable price it is a winner.
Pros
Works well with the FirmTek SeriTek/1VE4 host adapter.
Can boot drives using the 1VE4.
Provides hot swap capability when used with the 1VE4.
Supports Mac OS 9, and OS X 10.1.5 or later when using a Firmtek card.
Provides excellent hard drive cooling capability.
Allows you to determine which bays will be powered.
Provides slide in aluminum trays with an easy release latch.
Extra trays are only $14.95 each.
Secure backplane drive mounting.
Temperature alarm.
Fan failure alarm.
Great performance.
Only $229 for a four bay SATA enclosure.
Can also be used with a PC internally or externally with a PC SATA card.
Cons
Fan is not quiet.
Turning bay power off and on without restarting may confuse 1VE4.
Disk Array 4SA (AE4RCS35NSA) gets 4 AMUGs out of 5!
The Addonics Disk Array 4SA works great with a PowerMac when used with a SeriTek/1VE4 host adapter, two external power supplies (AADCPAC12V) and shielded SATA cables (AASAEDC3F). The cooling and performance capabilities of the Disk Array 4SA are very nice. With high cooling capability usually comes the increased sound of a strong fan and the 4SA is no exception. The Disk Array 4SA is a good solution for adding a four bay SATA enclosure to any desktop computer or server at a reasonable price.
Contact Information:
Addonics Technologies
2466 Kruse Drive,
San Jose, CA 95131 USA
408-433-3899
addonics@addonics.com
http://www.addonics.com
Copyright 2005
Arizona Macintosh Users Group, Inc. (AMUG). Visit AMUG at www.amug.org for news, discounts and friends. JOIN AMUG!