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May 25, 2007
Eight Bay Dual Port Multiplier eSATA Enclosure
A Review of the EnhanceBox E8-PM SATA PM Hot Swap 8-Bay Hard Drive Enclosure
By Arthur Whalem
Enhance Technology, Inc. is shipping the EnhanceBox E8 eight bay Serial ATA hard drive enclosure. It is available in two configurations, multilane (ML) or port multiplier (PM). The two models are identical with the exception that the EnhanceBox E8-ML ($595) provides a dual multilane interface and the EnhanceBox E8-PM ($699) includes a dual eSATA port multiplier interface. AMUG previously reviewed the E8-ML model which provides great RAID 5 performance when used with the HighPoint RocketRAID 2322 external Mini-SAS to PCIe SATA II RAID controller. In this article, the characteristics and performance of the EnhanceBox E8-PM model ($699) will be discussed.
The EnhanceBox E8-PM includes two internal SATA PM boards which support up to four hard drives per port multiplier. Two eSATA data ports are provided on the rear of the E8-PM. The EnhanceBox E8 features eight hot swap hard drive bays enclosed in a silver aluminum enclosure. An internal universal 300 watt power supply with an ultra quiet 120mm fan powers the hard drives.
The EnhanceBox E8 supports both SATA I and SATA II hard drives. The front access door displays a blue power light and a yellow status light when closed. Each hard drive bay has its own locking mechanism which supports a key. The enclosure measures 18" deep, 11.5" high and 5.9" wide. The EnhanceBox E8 weighs approximately 18 pounds empty and 29 pounds with eight Seagate 7200.10 320GB SATA II hard drives installed. It is compatible with Macintosh, Windows or Linux computers that have a SATA PM host adapter.
System Requirements
Works with any computer that supports an external SATA PM interface.
Supports Mac OS X and Windows XP.
Supports up to eight external 3.5" SATA hard drives.
What's Included?
The EnhanceBox E8-PM enclosure includes the disk enclosure, two eSATA data cables, eight 3.5" hard drive trays, hard drive mounting screws, drive tray keys, and a power cord.
Rear ConnectionsThe EnhanceBox E8-PM eight bay SATA port multiplier enclosure has a power cord outlet on the right side of the case and a power on/off switch just to the left of it. On the left side, two eSATA data ports are provided for connecting the hard drives mounted inside the EnhanceBox E8-PM to a SATA PM compatible host adapter. Each port multiplier provides blue status lights on the rear of the enclosure that light up when the host controller and the hard drives are detected. The host controller status light is closest to the eSATA data port.
Several different SATA PM host adapter choices are available for Macintosh users. All of the two port SATA PM host adapters that AMUG has tested provide slow striped RAID set performance. They will work well for mounting individual hard drives inside the EnhanceBox E8-PM enclosure, but RAID performance will be limited as they are 1x PCIe cards.
From my experience, most users that are interested in an eight bay SATA PM enclosure are usually looking for a high performance RAID solution. AMUG has found that Macintosh compatible PCIe four lane and eight lane 4-port SATA PM host adapters provide the best RAID performance with the EnhanceBox E8-PM enclosure.
Macintosh PCI Express (PCIe) SATA PM host adapters that provide excellent RAID performance with the EnhanceBox E8-PM include the Sonnet Tempo E4P ($299.95), the NORCO-4629 ($189), the DATOptic eSATA_PCIe8 ($189) and the HighPoint RocketRAID 2314 ($200). The HighPoint RocketRAID 2314 is the only host adapter in this group that offers RAID 5.
The EnhanceBox E8-PM enclosure provides a sturdy enclosure for mounting external SATA hard drives. The eSATA data ports on the rear of the enclosure are easy to access and work well with any host adapter that supports port multiplication.
Fan AccessThe EnhanceBox E8 provides a panel on the rear of the enclosure for easy access to the fan assembly. Two thumb screws on either side of the 80x80x25mm fan mounting panel allow the assembly to be removed from the enclosure. The user serviceable fan design allows the 80mm hard drive cooling fan to be removed without disconnecting any wires. The fan is mounted on a perforated cooling access panel with four screws which makes it easy to replace with a different 80mm cooling fan. The circuit board design on the right side of the assembly allows the fan to plug directly into the enclosure power socket when the fan panel is mounted on the rear of the enclosure.
This same user serviceable fan design can be found on the Sonnet Fusion 500P and Fusion 400 SATA enclosures. Users that own a Sonnet Fusion SATA enclosure will find that the EnhanceBox E8 style, design and components resemble many of the same features found in the Sonnet Fusion enclosures. As there are only a few SATA enclosure manufacturers in the world, my guess is that the EnhanceBox E8 and the Sonnet Fusion enclosures are produced by the same OEM.
Interface
The EnhanceBox E8 utilizes drive trays that mount the hard drives with four screws on the bottom of the tray. Hard drives are very easy to mount in these trays. Hot swap trays that utilize screws on the bottom of the tray for attaching the hard drives are usually easier to install than trays that use screws on the sides of the hard drives. It is easier to lay a hard drive flat for tray installation than on its side. Be sure that all of the screws are securely attached as a loose screw can cause the tray to be difficult to remove from the enclosure.
Once the hard drives are mounted in the EnhanceBox E8 drive trays they can be inserted into the hot swap bays. Users simply push the tray all the way in and close the handle to connect the hard drive to the SATA backplane. The hard drive will click into place once the handle is closed. The EnhanceBox E8 drive trays provide a secure mounting system for external SATA data storage.
To eject a drive tray from the EnhanceBox E8, users push the small arrow on the left side of the drive tray to the right. You can see the arrow circled in red in the image above. This action releases the tray so that it can be removed from the EnhanceBox E8. The release mechanism does not require a key provided that the bay is left unlocked. Users can lock any of the hard drive bays should they be concerned that someone might remove a hard drive without authorization.
Activity Lights
The EnhanceBox E8 provides a blue power light on the right side of each drive bay. The blue light shines once the enclosure is turned on whether a hard drive is mounted in the bay or not. A yellow drive presence light is located just below each power light. The yellow light shines when a hard drive is inserted in the drive bay. It also flashes with an orange color as the hard drives access data. Users can only see all of these lights when the enclosure door is open. Once the enclosure front door is closed, the EnhanceBox E8 displays the power and status light for bay number two.
Design
The exterior design of the EnhanceBox E8 provides clean lines and a sleek aluminum finish. While the enclosure has a boxy look to it, the silver aluminum exterior finish is an excellent match with the Apple Mac Pro desktop. In addition, the ribbed front door and vertical air flow openings add an elegant touch to the design of the EnhanceBox E8 enclosure. The hard drive activity lights are easily viewable with the door open, yet not distracting when the front panel is closed. The EnhanceBox E8 is almost seven inches longer than the Sonnet Fusion enclosure. The extra room is needed to house the high efficiency 300 watt power supply and its low noise (>25dBA) 120mm cooling fan. The EnhanceBox E8 design and tray system are very similar to the Fusion 500P SATA PM enclosure. The hot swap trays included with the EnhanceBox E8 also work with the Sonnet Fusion enclosures and visa versa. This feature adds flexibility for users that own both enclosure types.Internal Design
The EnhanceBox E8-PM enclosure is designed for mounting SATA hard drives using port multiplication. It requires a SATA host adapter that also supports port multiplication. A SATA port multiplier also known as "SATA PM" is a device that allows several SATA hard drives to share a single port on the host adapter. The SATA PM interface provides fast FIS (Frame Information Structure) based switching between hard drives on the 5x1 SATA PM board. Port multipliers typically reside inside an enclosure and are transparent to the drives. Port multipliers allow SATA enclosures to accommodate many more hard drives than the direct connect method, which requires a single SATA data port for each hard drive connected. In the case of the EnhanceBox E8-PM enclosure, two 5x1 SATA PM boards are mounted inside the enclosure with four hard drives assigned to each port multiplier.
If you look inside the EnhanceBox E8-PM you will see that the hard drives attach to the front of the SATA backplane and individual 11" SATA cables attach to the rear of the backplane. These cables are connected to the dual port multiplier board located at the rear of the EnhanceBox E8-PM enclosure. Individual backplane boards are mounted for each hard drive in the EnhanceBox E8 design. Four pin molex connectors provide each backplane board with power.
Exposed Rear Backplane View
Even though this enclosure design utilizes internal SATA cables it does not seem to impact the hard drive performance. The side aluminum panels of the EnhanceBox E8 easily come off by removing three screws on the rear of the enclosure. In the image below you can view the internal workings of the EnhanceBox E8 with the side panel off. The eight hard drive bays are on the left side and the power supply and the dual port multiplier board are on the right.
Exposed Side View
If you remove all of the drive trays from the EnhanceBox E8 enclosure and look inside, you can examine the backplanes that the hard drives connect to. As shown in the image below, eight SATA backplane connectors are mounted at the rear of the hard drive bays. Ventilation slots are provided between each SATA backplane board. A 80x80x25mm exhaust fan and the power supply fan are located behind the hard drive chamber.
Internal Backplane View
Energy Usage
According to the Kill-a-Watt electricity usage monitor, the EnhanceBox E8-PM enclosure uses 20 watts when the enclosure is turned on but empty. Adding a single Maxline III model 7V300F0 300GB SATA hard drive increases the energy usage to 30 watts while idle. Once eight Maxline III model 7V300F0 300GB SATA hard drives are mounted inside the enclosure the power usage increases to 101 watts while idle. When the Maxline III eight drive striped RAID set begins copying lots of data the power usage rises to 113-115 watts.
When mounting a single Seagate 7200.10 320GB SATA hard drive inside the EnhanceBox E8-PM enclosure the energy usage is 29 watts while idle. Once eight Seagate 7200.10 320GB SATA hard drives are mounted inside the enclosure the power usage increases to 86 watts while idle. When the Seagate eight drive striped RAID set begins copying lots of data the power usage rises to 101-103 watts.
The EnhanceBox E8-PM enclosure requires approximately 10 watts more power than the EnhanceBox E8-ML. The reason for this is that the internal dual Silicon Image SiI-3726 port multiplier requires approximately 10 watts. The EnhanceBox E8-ML uses a multilane bridge instead, which does not require power. While the EnhanceBox E8-ML is more energy efficient than the EnhanceBox E8-PM enclosure, it does not support SATA PM functionality.
Hot Swap
The EnhanceBox E8 enclosure supports hot swap. This feature works well when the EnhanceBox E8 is used with a SATA host adapter that also supports hot swap. AMUG tested the EnhanceBox E8-PM enclosure with the Sonnet Tempo E4P ($299.95), the NORCO-4629 ($189), the DATOptic eSATA_PCIe8 ($189) and the HighPoint RocketRAID 2314 ($200). When using the Apple Mac Pro desktop computer with the SiI-3124 v2.0.3 driver, the NORCO-4629 and the DATOptic eSATA_PCIe8 were able to hot swap individual hard drives and striped RAID sets very well with the EnhanceBox E8-PM.
The Sonnet Tempo E4P is also able to hot swap hard drives using the Sonnet Mac Pro driver v2.1. However, turning the enclosure off or restarting the computer may be required when hot swapping striped RAID sets with the Tempo E4P installed in a Mac Pro. Using a PCI PowerMac G5 with the Tempo X4P or a PCIe PowerMac G5 with the Sonnet E4P with driver 2.0.3 seems to provide better hot swap capability with striped RAID sets. During AMUG tests, the Sonnet Tempo driver version 2.1 for the Mac Pro was never able to hot swap striped RAID sets with as much reliability and speed as the older Sonnet PPC 2.0.3 Mac driver. This issue will usually only be noticable to users that hot swap striped RAID sets frequently.
The HighPoint RocketRAID 2314 supports RAID 5 but it does not support traditional Mac OS X hot swap. Instead, users will need to utilize the HighPoint web manager to mount and dismount hard disks or restart.
CoolingIn the cooling test, the EnhanceBox E8-PM enclosure was tested with a 2.33 TB striped RAID set using eight Seagate 7200.10 320GB SATA hard drives with an Apple Mac Pro 2.66 GHz. The eight hard drives were worked very hard duplicating a 4.2GB folder of video files up to twenty times simultaneously for 90 minutes. The HighPoint web based RAID management software was used to display the SATA hard drive temperatures. At the end of 90 minutes the Seagate hard drives reported temperatures of 120.2 to 123.8 degrees Fahrenheit. The next process of the cooling test was to leave the enclosure turned on with the hard drives mounted for an hour, but with no usage other than temperature monitoring. I wanted to see how well the hard drives might cool down inside the EnhanceBox E8-PM enclosure. After resting for an hour, the Seagate 7200.10 320GB hard drives reported temperatures of 109.4 to 116.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The ambient room temperature was 78 degrees Fahrenheit during this test and the enclosure front panel was closed.
In order to determine if the hard drive cooling capability of the EnhanceBox E8 could be improved, the air flow of the enclosure was examined. In the stock configuration, much of the air being vented from the EnhanceBox E8 is entering the enclosure through the 140 holes on the right side panel of the enclosure. This design reduces the amount of new air coming into the enclosure through the hard drive bays which impacts hard drive cooling. As a test, the top eight rows of holes on the side panel were covered with black electrical tape inside the panel. Four sections of tape were used, with each one covering two rows. This left two rows of 14 holes still open at the bottom of the side panel. In the front of the enclosure the bottom row of vents was also covered, leaving one row still open for air circulation.With this alteration applied, less air enters the side of the EnhanceBox E8. Instead, more of the incoming air is pulled through the hard drive bays which enhances the hard drive cooling capability of the enclosure. In addition, leaving the front door open while 80% of the side holes are taped shut can improve hard drive cooling even more. The heat test results are provided below:
Seagate 7200.10 320GB Temperatures in Fahrenheit
| E8-PM | Stock | Door Closed | Taped | Door Open | Taped | |
| Location | After 90 min. | Hour idle | After 90 min. | Hour idle | After 90 min. | Hour idle |
| Top Bay | 120.2 | 109.4 | 113 | 105.8 | 109.4 | 102.2 |
| Bay #2 | 123.8 | 114.8 | 116.6 | 107.6 | 113 | 105.8 |
| Bay #3 | 123.8 | 113 | 116.6 | 107.6 | 113 | 105.8 |
| Bay #4 | 122 | 111.2 | 113 | 105.8 | 109.4 | 104 |
| Bay #5 | 123.8 | 114.8 | 114.8 | 109.4 | 111.2 | 107.6 |
| Bay #6 | 123.8 | 116.6 | 116.6 | 109.4 | 113 | 107.6 |
| Bay #7 | 123.8 | 114.8 | 116.6 | 107.6 | 113 | 105.8 |
| Bay #8 | 122 | 111.2 | 114.8 | 105.8 | 109.4 | 104 |
As you can see in the table above, once the air flow on the right side panel is reduced, the amount of cool air coming in through the hard drive bays is increased which provides additional hard drive cooling. Opening the front door while the enclosure is operating reduces hard drive heat by an additional 2-3 degrees. While the stock cooling design of the EnhanceBox E8 is certainly within most major hard drive manufacturers environmental guidelines, users can easily increase the cooling capability of the EnhanceBox E8 with a few pieces of tape.
Acoustics
Enhance Technology has upgraded the EnhanceBox E8 design with a new quiet power supply. The new power supply has a 120mm ultra quiet fan. If the 80mm drive fan is removed and the EnhanceBox E8 is turned on, I hear no fan noise at all.
One of the loudest components in many multi-bay SATA enclosures is the power supply fan. The ultra quiet power supply provided inside the EnhanceBox E8 is a massive step forward for multimedia users that want to maintain a quiet working environment.
Image of the Power Supply provided in the bottom of the Enhance E8-PM.
During this review, the EnhanceBox E8 was loaded with eight Seagate 7200.10 320GB hard drives and placed beside an Apple Mac Pro 2.66 GHz. The Apple Mac Pro is ultra quiet. The wind sound generated by the stock EnhanceBox 80mm cooling fan can be heard over the Mac Pro from three feet away. It is a soft, quiet wind sound. Once the hard drives are configured in a striped RAID set and are copying lots of data, the noise generated by the eight hard drives can easily be heard above the quiet wind noise generated by the 80mm cooling fan. I would classify the new EnhanceBox E8 power supply as one of the quietest designs I have used in an 8-bay external SATA enclosure.
RAID PerformanceThe EnhanceBox E8-PM was tested with several SATA host adapters during this performance test. A striped RAID set was configured using eight Seagate 7200.10 320GB model ST3320620AS hard drives and eight Maxline III 7V300F0 hard drives for comparison. 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 EnhanceBox E8-PM performs with different Macintosh compatible SATA host adapters and hard drives.
EnhanceBox E8-PM Eight 320GB 7200.10 Striped RAID Set
| Area Full | write | read | write | read | write | read | write | read |
| empty | 413 | 405 | 420 | 403 | 425 | 401 | 436 | 409 |
| 10% | 421 | 405 | 420 | 402 | 426 | 401 | 437 | 410 |
| 20% | 420 | 406 | 421 | 402 | 427 | 402 | 436 | 406 |
| 30% | 420 | 406 | 420 | 396 | 427 | 392 | 435 | 411 |
| 40% | 421 | 410 | 421 | 408 | 427 | 407 | 433 | 412 |
| 50% | 421 | 412 | 421 | 409 | 428 | 402 | 435 | 421 |
| 60% | 421 | 418 | 422 | 414 | 428 | 411 | 437 | 430 |
| 70% | 421 | 423 | 423 | 421 | 429 | 422 | 434 | 432 |
| 80% | 409 | 398 | 414 | 386 | 413 | 383 | 406 | 401 |
| 90% | 362 | 354 | 372 | 344 | 374 | 343 | 358 | 359 |
| 100% | 295 | 293 | 300 | 282 | 303 | 283 | 290 | 295 |
| Average | 402 | 394 | 405 | 388 | 410 | 386 | 413 | 399 |
| Type | Disk | Utility | Disk | Utility | Disk | Utility | Disk | Utility |
| Size | 2.33TB | 2.33TB | 2.33TB | 2.33TB |
EnhanceBox E8-PM Eight 300GB 7V300F0 Striped RAID Set
| Area Full | write | read | write | read | write | read | write | read |
| empty | 412 | 475 | 417 | 462 | 426 | 460 | 432 | 482 |
| 10% | 419 | 475 | 422 | 461 | 429 | 461 | 437 | 484 |
| 20% | 420 | 473 | 422 | 460 | 428 | 259 | 437 | 484 |
| 30% | 418 | 474 | 424 | 458 | 428 | 458 | 437 | 484 |
| 40% | 420 | 472 | 423 | 454 | 428 | 457 | 437 | 484 |
| 50% | 416 | 465 | 423 | 451 | 431 | 451 | 438 | 468 |
| 60% | 418 | 443 | 423 | 439 | 430 | 443 | 438 | 454 |
| 70% | 416 | 410 | 405 | 411 | 403 | 412 | 420 | 414 |
| 80% | 384 | 387 | 382 | 390 | 383 | 387 | 401 | 393 |
| 90% | 352 | 354 | 351 | 355 | 353 | 354 | 362 | 355 |
| 100% | 301 | 303 | 301 | 302 | 302 | 302 | 307 | 303 |
| Average | 398 | 430 | 399 | 422 | 404 | 422 | 413 | 437 |
| Type | Disk | Utility | Disk | Utility | Disk | Utility | Disk | Utility |
| Size | 2.18TB | 2.18TB | 2.18TB | 2.18TB |
As you can see in the table above, the eight drive Maxline 300GB model 7V300F0 striped RAID set can provide read performance that is almost 10% higher than the Seagate 7200.10 when utilized in a SATA PM configuration. The Seagate 7200.10 provides marginally better write speeds than the 7V300F0 with SATA PM. My guess is that the Maxline 7V300F0 handles NCQ more efficiently than the 7200.10. However, the Seagate 320GB 7200.10 is always able to provide higher Disktester performance than the 7V300F0 when used in a direct connect configuration.The 7V300F0 vs 7200.10 performance results may be irrelevant for users that do not already own the Maxline III 7V300F0. The reason is that after Seagate purchased Maxtor, they discontinued the 7V300F0. The 7V300F0 is no longer available and from what I have seen so far, the benefits provided by the Maxline III 7V300F0 with SATA PM configurations has not been incorporated into current Seagate models. Hard drives that perform well with direct connect setups do not always provide the same high performance with port multipliers.
All of the SATA host adapters used in these tests work well with the EnhanceBox E8-PM. However, the HighPoint RocketRAID 2314 was able to perform slightly faster. The disadvantage of the RocketRAID 2314 is that it does not support traditional Mac OS X hot swap. On the plus side, the RocketRAID 2314 is the only SATA port multiplier compatible host adapter that currently provides RAID 5 capability with Mac OS X. Lets examine how the RocketRAID 2314 performs with the EnhanceBox E8-PM using RAID 5.
RAID 5 PerformanceIn this test, eight hard drives mounted inside the EnhanceBox E8-PM were setup in a RAID 5 configuration. The size of the RAID is a little smaller as the space of one hard drive is used for parity information. This causes the RAID size to shrink and the performance to be reduced. As you can see in the results below, the RocketRAID 2314 RAID 5 write performance is lower than the read performance. The HighPoint XOR RAID 5 engine is not able to provide the same high performance write capability with SATA port multiplier interfaces that it provides with a direct connect setup. Performance of the EnhanceBox E8-ML "direct connect" multilane enclosure using the RocketRAID 2322 is included for comparison. A RAID 1/0 configuration is also provided. Audio/Video producers may find that the EnhanceBox E8-ML and RocketRAID 2322 combination provides a better choice when high speed RAID 5 write performance is required.
EnhanceBox E8 RAID 5 & RAID 1/0 Performance
| Area Full | write | read | write | read | write | read | write | read |
| empty | 252 | 448 | 258 | 349 | 193 | 285 | 509 | 510 |
| 10% | 252 | 448 | 260 | 348 | 196 | 286 | 507 | 510 |
| 20% | 253 | 448 | 255 | 350 | 197 | 284 | 496 | 496 |
| 30% | 252 | 444 | 261 | 351 | 199 | 277 | 479 | 482 |
| 40% | 251 | 429 | 254 | 354 | 200 | 267 | 463 | 464 |
| 50% | 252 | 407 | 261 | 354 | 199 | 259 | 441 | 444 |
| 60% | 252 | 396 | 252 | 362 | 199 | 244 | 414 | 416 |
| 70% | 253 | 363 | 255 | 362 | 202 | 228 | 387 | 387 |
| 80% | 250 | 345 | 266 | 352 | 202 | 208 | 357 | 357 |
| 90% | 251 | 312 | 264 | 313 | 178 | 186 | 317 | 316 |
| 100% | 250 | 266 | 248 | 258 | 146 | 155 | 258 | 258 |
| Average | 252 | 392 | 258 | 341 | 192 | 244 | 421 | 422 |
| Type | Web | Web | Web | Web | ||||
| Size | 1.91TB | 2.04TB | 1.16TB | 2.04TB |
While the EnhanceBox E8-PM can provide RAID 5 capability using the RocketRAID 2314, the performance is slower than when using the EnhanceBox E8-ML with a RocketRAID 2322. If the users primary goal is to provide a fast RAID 5 configuration with the Apple Mac Pro, I would suggest using the EnhanceBox E8-ML instead of the EnhanceBox E8-PM.
The EnhanceBox E8-PM SATA enclosure provides a high quality eight bay storage system that works well with an Apple Mac Pro with a SATA PM host adapter installed. The new EnhanceBox E8 ultra quiet power supply and the user serviceable 80mm fan design provide users with a powerful, yet quiet eight bay SATA PM enclosure. The EnhanceBox E8-PM works well with the Sonnet Tempo E4P ($299.95), the NORCO-4629 ($189), the DATOptic eSATA_PCIe8 ($189) and the HighPoint RocketRAID 2314 ($200). As these SATA host adapters provide four ports, up to two EnhanceBox E8-PM enclosures can be supported with a single host adapter. Dual E8-PM enclosures can provide a high quality, high performance sixteen drive striped RAID set configuration.
The EnhanceBox E8 activity lights provide excellent user feed back and can be seen with the hard drive access door open. Users that do not want to view the activity lights can simply close the front door of the enclosure. The hard drive trays provided with
the EnhanceBox E8 are interchangable with the Sonnet Fusion 400 and 500P enclosures which provides a nice feature for users that work with both of these excellent enclosures. In addition, the EnhanceBox E8 is easily modifiable. The side panels can be removed with three screws on the rear of the enclosure. The 80mm cooling fan assembly unscrews and the front door can be removed by releasing an enclosure foot and loosening three screws on the bottom. The EnhanceBox E8 is one of the few enclosures that supports eight hard drives in a single quiet SATA enclosure. All of these features make the EnhanceBox E8 a great option for Apple Mac Pro users that want to expand their computers hard drive capabilities.
Pros
EnhanceBox E8-PM works with any OS with SATA PM capability.
If used with RocketRAID 2314 adds RAID 0, 1, 5, 1/0 and 5/0 features.
Mounts up to eight external SATA hard drives.
Measured 258MB/sec. average write performance with RAID 5.
Measured 413MB/sec. average write performance with RAID 0.
4 drives per port multiplier performs great with a 16 drive striped RAID set.
Ultra Quiet power supply.
User serviceable 80mm fan module.
LED activity lights.
Lockable hard drive bays.
Looks great with the Apple Mac Pro.
Can be easily modified for better HD cooling.
Easy access enclosure for modifications.
Mounts individual hard drives or a RAID configuration.
Well designed, easy to use and easy to install.
Cons
No power switch on front panel. (Only on the rear)
Side air vents could be reduced to help increase air flow to drive bays.
Design is limited to 4 drives per port multiplier.
Enclosure corners may seem sharp.
EnhanceBox E8-PM gets 4 AMUGs out of 5!
One of the biggest issues with multibay hard drive enclosures is the acoustic noise levels that they can produce. The new EnhanceBox E8 design over comes this issue with a whisper quiet power supply. Users that are looking for a large hard drive subsystem with good acoustic qualities will find the
EnhanceBox E8 is an excellent choice. It is difficult to find a high quality, eight drive, hot swap, dual port multiplier enclosure with all of the features that are included with the EnhanceBox E8-PM. Users that want to setup a large SATA PM RAID system will find the EnhanceBox E8 PM is an excellent choice. A list of resellers for the EnhanceBox E8 series can be found at this link.Contact Information:
Enhance Technology, Inc.
12221 Florence Ave.
Santa Fe Springs, CA. 90670 USA
Phone: 1-562-777-3488
http://www.enhance-tech.com/
info@enhance-tech.com
Copyright 2007
Arizona Macintosh Users Group, Inc. (AMUG). Visit AMUG at www.amug.org for news, discounts and friends. JOIN AMUG!
Additional Resources
AMUG EnhanceBox E8-ML SATA Multilane 8-Bay Enclosure Review
AMUG DAT Optic eSATA_PCIe8 SATA Host Adapter Review
AMUG NORCO-4629 4-Port PCIe SATA Host Adapter Review
AMUG Sonnet Tempo E4P Mac Pro HD Expansion Review
AMUG RocketRAID 2314 PCIe 4-Port SATA RAID Controller Review