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May 23, 2008
SATA Four Bay, Mini-SAS, I2C Enclosure
A Review of the CineRAID 4-bay EditPRO Portable RAID Enclosure (Model T04)
By Arthur Whalem
Tekram USA, Inc. is shipping the CineRAID T04, 4-bay EditPRO portable RAID enclosure ($499). This enclosure has a four channel mini-SAS connector and four SATA hard drive bays that utilize a hot swap tray system. The CineRAID T04 provides an aluminum "screen door" front panel design that is intended to match the exterior of the Apple Mac Pro.
The combination of a small form factor, I2C support for Areca controllers and an elegant appearance makes the CineRAID T04 an interesting choice for adding external storage to the Apple Mac Pro. The front panel displays a blue enclosure power light. Individual green hard drive power lights are located on each tray and blue activity lights flash when an Areca I2C controller is attached. If a hard drive fails, the I2C connection provides a red light on the failed hard drive tray. No activity or failure lights are provided if a compatible I2C controller is not attached to the enclosure. The CineRAID T04 enclosure measures 10" deep, 9.4" high, 6.5" wide and weighs approximately 10 pounds, 10.4 ounces when empty. When four Samsung 1TB SATA II hard drives are installed the enclosure weighs 16 pounds. The purpose of this review is to determine how the CineRAID T04 will perform with an Apple Mac Pro computer.
System Requirements
Supports Mac OS X, Linux and Windows.
Requires up to four external 3.5" SATA hard drives.
Requires an I2C capable Areca controller for activity LED support.
What's Included?
The CineRAID T04 enclosure includes the disk enclosure, four 3.5" SATA hard drive trays, a mini-SAS to mini-SAS data cable, an I2C cable, hard drive mounting screws and a power cord.
Rear Connections
The CineRAID T04 four bay mini-SAS enclosure has a power cord outlet on the left side of the case, followed by a small power supply fan and a power on/off switch on the right side. In the middle of the rear of the case is a 120mm cooling fan. Above that is the I2C connector and the four channel mini-SAS data connector.
Interface
The CineRAID T04 utilizes drive trays for mounting each hard drive. I used four screws on the bottom of the tray to mount the hard drives. However, these hot swap, trays also have screw openings on the side of the tray if you prefer a side mount. All of the screws must be securely attached, as a loose screw may cause the drive tray to be difficult to remove from the enclosure. Hard drives are very easy to install in these trays.
The only negative I see with the CineRAID T04 tray design is that no vents are provided in the bottom of the tray. I believe the hard drives may operate a little cooler if the bottom of the hard drive tray had air vents. Once the hard drives are mounted in the CineRAID drive trays they can be inserted into the drive bays. Users simply push the tray all the way in and close the handle to connect the hard drive to the SATA backplane. The CineRAID hard drive trays provide a secure mounting system for external 3.5" SATA hard drives.
To eject a drive from the CineRAID T04, users push the small tab on the right side of the drive tray to the left. You can see the eject tab by looking at the arrows in the image above. This action releases the tray so that it can be removed from the enclosure. The release latch does not require a key and does not have a locking mechanism.
When hard drives are installed, the CineRAID T04 provides a green power light on the left side of each drive tray . When no hard drive is installed the tray looks like the image above. If the enclosure is attached to an Areca I2C compatible card the activity lights are blue and a hard drive failure creates a red light on the tray. Unfortunately, if the controller used is not an Areca card with I2C support the enclosure will not provide any HD activity lights.
Design
The exterior design of the CineRAID T04 provides clean lines and a sleek aluminum finish. The silver aluminum exterior finish is a nice match with Apple Mac Pro computers. When used with an I2C controller the LEDs are very informative. They provide information about hard drive failures and drive activity while sporting an elegant appearance.
Internal Design
The CineRAID T04 enclosure is designed to mount up to four external SATA hard drives with a mini-SAS connector while providing I2C support. If you look at the internal backplane assembly you will find cooling vents are located between each hard drive backplane module. This allows a 120mm Yen Sun Technology model FD129225LB-N(2A3) fan to pull air across the hard drives and out the rear of the enclosure. The fan spins at 1900 RPM with a 25.0 dBA noise level. It provides an air flow rate of approximately 40 cubic feet per minute (CFM).
If you take the five outer screws off of the rear of the enclosure, the frame can be removed from the CineRAID T04. The image below displays an inside view of the enclosure. The 200W Seasonic power supply is located on the bottom of the frame. Above it is the 4-bay tray housing, backplane modules and the fan. SATA cables attach the backplane to the mini-SAS/I2C connector board on the top of the enclosure. The I2C board allows an Areca I2C compatible controller to communicate with the enclosure, which provides blue activity LEDs and red disk failure lights. This is a nice setup for instant notification of a hard drive failure.
Exposed Inside View
Energy Usage
According to the Kill-a-Watt electricity usage monitor, the CineRAID T04 enclosure uses 7 watts when empty. When four Samsung 1TB hard drives are installed and idle the enclosure requires 43 watts. Once the RAID set begins copying lots of data the power usage rises to 49-50 watts.
Cooling
In order to determine the cooling capability of the CineRAID T04 enclosure, four Hitachi 1TB hard drives were installed and busy copying data for 90 minutes. I wanted to determine what the hard drive temperature readings would be with four Hitachi A7K1000 Ultrastar 1TB Model HUA721010KLA330, 3.5" SATA hard drives mounted inside the CineRAID T04 while running the standard AMUG heat test. The enclosure was connected to a Mac Pro 2.8 GHz running Mac OS X and worked very hard duplicating several large video files. After 90 minutes of continual activity the hard drive temperatures were recorded using the Areca controller SMART data. Next, the enclosure was left idle for 60 minutes but still mounted on the desktop without sleep mode. This allowed me to determined how the enclosure might cool down. The results are displayed in the table below.
CineRAID T04 Enclosure 1TB Hitachi Hard Drive Heat Test
| Temperature in Fahrenheit | 90 min. Duplicating | 60 min. Idle |
| AMUG Heat Test | ||
| Bay 1 | 127.4F | 116.6F |
| Bay 2 | 129.2 | 116.6 |
| Bay 3 | 129.2 | 116.6 |
| Bay 4 | 127.4F | 116.6 |
The hard drive temperatures in the table above are in Fahrenheit. The ambient room temperature was 82 degrees Fahrenheit. When I compared the heat test results of the CineRAID T04 against the FirmTek SeriTek/5PM with the same 1TB Hitachi hard drives, I found that the SeriTek/5PM was able to provide a significantly cooler HD environment (while the fan was set to medium). What was also interesting was that the SeriTek/5PM was also slightly quieter. The difference seems to be the newly designed FirmTek SeriTek/5PM heat management system which maximizes the airflow drawn across the hard drives. The CineRAID T04 was not able to keep the Hitachi 1TB hard drives below 120F during periods of extended heavy usage in this test. However, when the enclosure was inactive the fan was able to reduce the hard drive heat.
The Hitachi 1TB hard drives are one of the warmest hard drives that I have tested. As they operate quite warm in this CineRAID T04 cooling test, I wanted to see how the results would change with a cooler running 1TB hard drive. To complete this analysis the same heat test was performed using four Samsung 1TB hard drives, (which are the coolest running 1TB hard drives that AMUG has tested). The results are shown in the table below.
CineRAID T04 Enclosure 1TB Samsung Hard Drive Heat Test
| Temperature in Fahrenheit | 90 min. Duplicating | 60 min. Idle |
| AMUG Heat Test | ||
| Bay 1 | 104F | 96.8F |
| Bay 2 | 104 | 96.8 |
| Bay 3 | 105.8 | 98.6 |
| Bay 4 | 105.8 | 98.6 |
Since the CineRAID T04 did not provide the intense cooling features that were found in the FirmTek SeriTek/5PM enclosure, using the Samsung 1TB hard drives made the need for extra cooling unnecessary. Comparing the Hitachi and the Samsung 1TB heat test data indicates that the Samsung 1TB is a good choice for creating a cool running CineRAID T04 EditPRO RAID configuration.
Acoustics
The CineRAID T04 is quiet but not silent. When used with a Mac Pro 2.8 GHz the CineRAID EditPRO is louder than the computer. When four 3.5" SATA hard drives are in operation they will also add some acoustical noise. The quiet noise created by the CineRAID T04 fans allows the user to easily hear when the enclosure is turned on.
RAID PerformanceThe CineRAID T04 was tested using several RAID configurations during this performance test with four Samsung 1TB hard drives. DiskTester 2.0 10GB read and write tests were performed using a run area test so that this article could display how the RAID performs. DiskTester is a Terminal application that measures the combined performance of a volume and the Mac OS X operating system. Using the command: ./disktester run-area-test --chunk-size 128M --test-size 10G --delta-percent 10 DriveName, puts DiskTester to work testing how the RAID will perform when empty, 10% full, 20% full and so on. The tables below display how the CineRAID T04 performs with different Areca ARC-1221x RAID configurations.
CineRAID T04 Four Drive 1TB Samsung RAID Tests
| Area Full | write | read | write | read | write | read | write | read |
| empty | 389 | 380 | 282 | 293 | 290 | 286 | 194 | 194 |
| 10% | 385 | 374 | 286 | 284 | 285 | 283 | 191 | 190 |
| 20% | 398 | 410 | 291 | 305 | 288 | 312 | 195 | 209 |
| 30% | 406 | 389 | 308 | 292 | 305 | 291 | 204 | 204 |
| 40% | 390 | 375 | 291 | 282 | 292 | 281 | 195 | 202 |
| 50% | 374 | 362 | 276 | 273 | 271 | 276 | 186 | 181 |
| 60% | 348 | 344 | 265 | 248 | 264 | 257 | 179 | 173 |
| 70% | 334 | 313 | 223 | 236 | 246 | 236 | 165 | 158 |
| 80% | 309 | 296 | 231 | 223 | 231 | 222 | 155 | 150 |
| 90% | 266 | 235 | 200 | 190 | 179 | 185 | 134 | 128 |
| 100% | 221 | 204 | 163 | 154 | 163 | 155 | 109 | 106 |
| Average | 347 | 335 | 256 | 253 | 256 | 253 | 173 | 172 |
| Interface | mini-SAS | mini-SAS | mini-SAS | mini-SAS | ||||
| Bootable | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||||
| Redundant | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||||
| Size | 3.64TB | 2.73TB | 2.73TB | 1.82TB |
The results demonstrate that a striped RAID set will provide the highest performance. As expected, RAID 3, 5 and 10 provide redundancy at the cost of lower performance.
When the CineRAID T04 EditPRO enclosure is utilized with an Areca I2C compatible controller, it provides an amazing hard drive failure notification system right on the hard drive tray. This feature is excellent for monitoring, maintaining and rebuilding RAID sets with minimal effort. In addition, the CineRAID T04 EditPRO looks very nice with the Apple Mac Pro and is relatively quiet. The small footprint of the enclosure allows the unit to be placed on top of the Mac Pro with plenty of clearance for removing the hot swap hard drive trays.The CineRAID T04 enclosure does have some limitations. If it is not configured with an Areca I2C compatible controller, no activity lights will blink. Most currently selling eSATA enclosures provide activity lights without requiring an I2C compatible controller card. As a result, the CineRAID T04 provides advanced activity and failure lights with a compatible I2C controller, but provides less hard drive monitoring tools than most other enclosures when an I2C interface is not available.
The bottom line is that the CineRAID T04 enclosure is a great choice for use with an Areca I2C compatible card. However, it would not be my top pick for installations with a controller that does not support the awesome CineRAID T04 EditPRO I2C interface.
Pros
Supports Macintosh, Windows or Linux computers.
Supports up to four external 3.5" SATA hard drives.
Supports I2C for advanced fault and activity LEDs with Areca controllers.
Power supply isolated from hard drive mounting bays.
Good cooling results provided with Samsung 1TB HDs.
Includes a mini-SAS data cable.
Reasonably quiet operation.
Looks great with Apple Computers.
Well designed, easy to use and easy to install.
Cons
No power switch on front panel. (Only on the rear)
Will not provide activity lights without an Areca card with I2C support.
HD trays do not provide a lock.
HD ventilation could be improved.
CineRAID T04 EditPRO gets 4 AMUGs out of 5!
Apple Mac Pro or PowerMac G5 users that have an Areca SATA controller installed with I2C support will find the advanced fault and activity LEDs provided by the
CineRAID T04 EditPRO enclosure are an excellent feature. This is a heavy duty enclosure that looks great next to the Apple Mac Pro. The CineRAID T04 EditPRO provided excellent RAID performance results with the Areca controller and the Samsung 1TB hard drives used in this review.Contact Information:
Tekram USA, Inc.
2861 Saturn Street, Unit B
Brea, California 92821 USA
Phone: 714-961-0800 x107
http://www.cineraid.com/
Sales@CineRAID.com
Copyright 2008
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