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External SATA PowerA review of the FirmTek SATA-1SEN2 Bundle
By Arthur Whalem
FirmTek is now shipping the SeriTek/1SEN2 bundle which includes the SeriTek/1EN2 external dual-bay enclosure and the SeriTek/1SE2 two-port external Serial ATA PCI adapter. The two external ports on the PCI card included with this bundle allow you to expand your use of SATA drives outside the Macintosh while offering hot-swap flexibility similar to that of FireWire enclosures. The enclosure is only slightly larger than two 3.5" hard drives with a height of 4.75 inches, 2.6 inches wide and 9 inches long.
System Requirements
OS 9, OS X10.1.5 or later, Windows 98/98SE/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003.
Compatible with all PowerMac G3, G4 & G5 computers.
Requires up to two SATA 3.5" drives.
DesignThe 1SEN2 enclosure is made of aluminum and includes a fan that will keep your drives cool even under heavy usage. Your SATA hard drives are mounted in a vented tray (with four screws) that slides into the enclosure. Two trays come with each external enclosure along with mounting screws. When the tray is fully inserted the back of the drive plugs into a connector that provides power to your drive and couples the SATA connections to the computer. The front panel latch closes forward to seal your drive connections. Sliding the front latch down easily releases your drive to be removed again. This is really quite a nice design for inserting and removing drive trays in a very small enclosure. Several pictures of the 1SEN2 enclosure can be displayed by clicking on the image to the right.
The image below is what you will see looking inside the enclosure with both trays removed. Two female sets of connectors in the back of the enclosure simply fit
directly onto your hard drive connectors. The trays and the opening are designed so that trays can only be inserted in the correct upright position. This design will keep the enclosure from being damaged by someone accidently inserting a tray upside down. When you see how small and easy to use the 1SEN2 really is, its easy to appreciate the design and thought that went into creating it. Another cool feature of the 1SEN2 is that extra trays are available for only $22. This gives you virtually unlimited storage capability. You can buy extra trays for different backup sets or any other special usage and have a fast swapping drive system with no restart required. The Hot-swap feature built into the 1SEN2 allows you to dismount drives and remove the trays just like a FireWire enclosure would. Fast SATA drive switching with no restart required is the only way to go.Formats
The SeriTek/1SEN2 bundle allows your Macintosh to read SATA external hard drives just like your internal drives. They mount with the same drive icon and can be erased, partitioned or setup in a RAID by Disk Utility just like your internal hard drive. Another nice feature is that 1SEN2 drives have the "Ignore ownership on this volume" unchecked once erased. All FireWire drives have this flag checked once erased and you have to uncheck it by doing a "get info" on the drive and removing this flag before making a bootable backup on it. I usually forget about this until the backup is in process and have to start the process over again. This will never happen with a drive in the 1SEN2 enclosure as it is set correctly for mirror bootable backups as a default.
Installing the PCI cardThe SeriTek/1SE2 Host Adapter that is provided with the 1SEN2 bundle plugs into any available PCI or PCI-X slot in a PowerMac. There are two external ports on the card that are used for connecting up to two SATA drives. If you are installing the SeriTek/1SE2 Host Adapter in a PowerMac G5 with PCI-X, install the card in slot #4 (the top slot) which supports 64-bit, 133 MHz (if it is available) for the best performance. In these tests, it was found that performance increased (by a few seconds) when the PCI card was installed in slot #4. Should you want to add more than two internal SATA drives FirmTek also sells the SeriTek/1S2 internal host adapter which is the same hardware except with internal connectors and no hot-swap capability. You can see a review of it at www.amug.org.
The FirmTek Hot Swap Feature
FireWire and USB users have enjoyed the benefits of hot swap devices for some time but the FirmTek implementation of hot swapping SATA drives is the first I have seen. Using this feature you can drag your 1SEN2 mounted drive to the trash to dismount it, then remove the drive from the enclosure and load a new drive without having to reboot the computer. The FirmTek hot swap software notifies you with dialog boxes indicating when the SATA configuration has changed and displays what drive model was mounted. According to Chi Kim Stanford of FirmTek the hot swap feature helps protect your drives if removed improperly and the dialog system allows users to verify any change in the mounting of their drives. In order to test the FirmTek data protection claim I removed an SATA drive from the FirmTek enclosure without properly dismounting it on the Macintosh. I do not recommend doing this with your valuable data. After a few minutes I re-inserted the same drive and found that the hot swap feature was able to re-establish the connection with the drive with no loss of data. I am sure that if I had done this while the drive was accessing data that damage could have occurred. What this means is that if you make a mistake and remove a drive without properly ejecting it, you may be able to recover provided it was not being accessed at the time. The FirmTek hot swap design is very forgiving and will help protect users from mistakes. If you have ever lost data hot swapping a USB or FireWire drive without properly dismounting it first you will appreciate this FirmTek "data protection" feature.
Performance
In order to determine what kind of performance might be expected from the SeriTek/1SEN2 bundle three tests were performed using a PowerMac G5 2.0GHz Dual with 1.5GB of memory running Mac OS X 10.3.7. A Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB SATA drive is mounted as the internal boot drive instead of the stock Seagate 160GB that came with it. These tests compare the SeriTek/1SEN2 bundle with the WiebeTech TrayDock FireWire 800 enclosure using the same SATA drives mounted in both enclosures. A set of ATA drives were also tested in the TrayDock as it can mount either SATA or ATA drives using different trays.
First Test
A folder of video files with a size of 4.25GB was copied from the internal Maxtor 300GB to the 1SEN2 external enclosure and back to the internal using several methods. The 300GB Maxtor G5 was less than 50% full during these tests and all other drives were empty.
| Copy 4.25GB | 1SEN2 Speed Copy Test | |
| Copy from | Copy to | Minutes |
| Maxtor 300GB (G5 internal) | Hitachi 160GB (1SEN2) | 1:24 |
| Hitachi 160GB (1SEN2) | Maxtor 300GB (G5 internal) | 1:18 |
| Maxtor 300GB (G5 internal) | Seagate 160GB (1SEN2) | 1:18 |
| Seagate 160GB (1SEN2) | Maxtor 300GB (G5 internal) | 1:18 |
| Maxtor 300GB (G5 internal) | Hitachi/Seagate RAID (1SEN2) | 1:18 |
| Hitachi/Seagate RAID (1SEN2) | Maxtor 300GB (G5 internal) | 1:18 |
The test above recorded a steady 1:18 minutes for most of the copies. The 1SEN2 bundle performance is very nice indeed. As a comparison, I ran these same tests with the same SATA drives mounted in a TrayDock enclosure using FireWire 800. A single WD 200GB ATA was tested also along with a dual WD 200GB ATA RAID mounted in two TrayDock enclosures. The test results are below.
| Copy 4.25GB | TrayDock Speed Copy Test | |
| Copy from | Copy to | Minutes |
| Maxtor 300GB (G5 internal) | Hitachi 160GB (TrayDock) | 1:36 |
| Hitachi 160GB (TrayDock) | Maxtor 300GB (G5 internal) | 1:17 |
| Maxtor 300GB (G5 internal) | Seagate 160GB (TrayDock) | 1:38 |
| Seagate 160GB (TrayDock) | Maxtor 300GB (G5 internal) | 1:18 |
| Maxtor 300GB (G5 internal) | Hitachi/Seagate RAID (TrayDock) | 1:18 |
| Hitachi/Seagate RAID (TrayDock) | Maxtor 300GB (G5 internal) | 1:18 |
| TrayDock ATA used | ||
| Maxtor 300GB (G5 internal) | WD 200GB ATA (TrayDock) | 1:35 |
| WD 200GB ATA (TrayDock) | Maxtor 300GB (G5 internal) | 1:20 |
| Maxtor 300GB (G5 internal) | WD 400GB ATA RAID (TrayDock) | 1:25 |
| WD 400GB ATA RAID (TrayDock) | Maxtor 300GB (G5 internal) | 1:15 |
While the tests above clearly show that the 1SEN2 bundle is a consistent performer in this speed copy test, it is interesting to note that the TrayDock was about as fast when reading data from it as the 1SEN2. However, when writing data to the TrayDock with FireWire 800 the transfer was slower by as much as 20%. It is also interesting that the less expensive ATA (WD 200GB) drives performed very close to the speed of the SATA drives. You can purchase ATA drives at significantly less cost than most SATA drives so I would have expected more difference in performance.
Second Test
In the second test Retrospect 6.0.204 was used to backup 117GB to the 1SEN2 and the TrayDock in single drive and RAID configurations. The performance was recorded for both the copy, verify, average and the time to complete the task in hours. A higher MB/minute is better.
| Backup 117GB Internal | ||||
| Copy to | Average MB/minute | Copy MB/minute | Verify MB/minute | Time in Hours |
| Hitachi 160GB (1SEN2) | 1455 | 1452 | 1457 | 2:46 |
| Seagate 160GB (1SEN2) | 1323 | 1436 | 1226 | 3:03 |
| Hitachi/Seagate RAID (1SEN2) | 1418 | 1537 | 1317 | 2:49 |
| Hitachi 160GB (TrayDock) | 1305 | 1366 | 1250 | 3:04 |
| Seagate 160GB (TrayDock) | 1261 | 1371 | 1167 | 3:11 |
| Hitachi/Seagate RAID (TrayDocks) | 1322 | 1387 | 1264 | 3:01 |
| WD 200GB ATA (TrayDock) | 1313 | 1331 | 1295 | 3:03 |
| WD 400GB ATA RAID (TrayDocks) | 1482 | 1493 | 1472 | 2:43 |
Two TrayDocks each containing a WD 200GB ATA drive setup as a RAID (stripe) configuration came in first by three seconds over the 1SEN2 enclosure using a single Hitachi 160GB. The original Seagate 160 which came with the PowerMac G5 2.0 Dual trailed the other drives in the test. The results show that a FireWire 800 two drive ATA RAID is a close match to the 1SEN2 with a single Hitachi 160GB drive setup. The 1SEN2 bundle allows the performance of a fast SATA drive to shine. I would estimate that the 1SEN2 may have come in first if I had two Hitachi 160GB drives to use in the 1SEN2 RAID test. The fact that you can get "RAID like" performance from a 1SEN2 bundle using a single drive without a RAID configuration is amazing. While RAID is a nice system it has two downsides. 1. The failure of one drive in an Apple RAID (stripe) configuration takes the entire RAID down. 2. A RAID requires two equal size drives which usually is more expensive than a single drive (especially if you only have one drive). If I can get close to "RAID like" performance from the 1SEN2 system using single drives that is outstanding.
| Boot Drive Test | Seconds |
| 300GB Maxtor Internal | 48 |
| Hitachi 160GB (1SEN2) | 58 |
| Seagate 160GB (1SEN2) | 62 |
| Hitachi/Seagate RAID (1SEN2) | 61 |
| Hitachi 160GB (TrayDock) | 48 |
| Seagate 160GB (TrayDock) | 44 |
| Hitachi/Seagate RAID (TrayDock) | 49 |
| WD 200GB ATA (TrayDock) | 44 |
| WD 400GB ATA RAID (TrayDock) | 46 |
As the 1SEN2 can be used to boot up your Macintosh this test records boot times for the 1SEN2, the internal and the TrayDock in different configurations as recorded. The FireWire 800 TrayDock came in first by a few seconds. The WD 200GB ATA drive in the TrayDock and the Seagate 160GB were the fastest at 44 seconds each. The 1SEN2 was 10 seconds slower than the TrayDock when booting with the same Hitachi 160GB in both enclosures. The 1SEN2 has more configuration to accomplish when starting up so I suspect that is the reason for the 10 second delay over the TrayDock FireWire 800 interface. In most situations you will use your internal drive to boot up your Macintosh but you may be interested in how these configurations compare. During the review process FirmTek stated they plan to release a firmware update to improve the 1SEN2 bundle boot performance.
Thoughts
The SeriTek/1SEN2 bundle is $259.95 for a two bay enclosure and a PCI card with hot-swap capability for up to two drives. You also get two three foot shielded SATA cables made to be used specifically with this system. A stand is also included along with keys and a CD with a manual on it. When I look at the performance achieved by the 1SEN2 bundle at approximately $130 per drive it is very hard to beat. In addition, AMUG members can save $24.95 on the 1SEN2 bundle for a limited time (see details below). The 1SEN2 PCI card and enclosure provide a well designed fast data delivery system that kept the hard drives cool even under hours of heavy operation backing up 117GB of data. In a hard working drive environment the 1SEN2 would be my first choice. While the 1SEN2 can only support SATA hard drives many users will already have other enclosures that can support their ATA drives. The "write" performance of the 1SEN2 bundle makes it a winner in these tests. The capability of the FireWire 800 TrayDock to support both SATA and ATA drives is a great feature but these tests indicate that FireWire 800 is having difficulty keeping up with the write speed of the 1SEN2 bundle. If you have a Macintosh with a free PCI slot and require the best drive "write" performance available the SeriTek/1SEN2 bundle is a wonderful option.
For my own needs I love using both the 1SEN2 and the TrayDock. The TrayDock provides absolute drive mounting flexibility and good performance while the 1SEN2 provides blazingly fast high speed "write" capability when you need it at a great price. A review of the TrayDock is posted at amug.org for those interested.Hard Drive Performance Tip
If you are trying to increase your hard drive performance you should know that a drive 80% full will perform up to 30% slower than the same drive that is less than 50% full. Keeping your drives at 50% or less of capacity will provide much greater performance and plenty of room for your next video project.
Pros
Mounts up to two additional SATA external drives.
Best performing enclosure tested to date.
Hot swapping SATA drive trays.
Inexpensive additional trays available.
Well designed and easy to install.
Can be used as a boot drive.
48-bit LBA support for drive sizes larger than 137GB
Small external footprint.
Internal fan works well.
Fewer drives mounted internally make for a cooler computer.
Can mount single drives or a RAID configuration.
Works with Mac OS 9 and 10.1.5 or higher.
No additional Mac drivers needed.
Works on all PowerMacs with a PCI slot.
Power and activity LEDs for each hard drive
Works with Macintosh or Windows
Dialog boxes provide drive mounting/unmounting feedback.
SeriTek/1SE2 PCI adapter supports deep sleep.
Cons
Only supports SATA drives.
Requires an empty PCI slot.
Slower boot drive performance than FireWire 800.
FirmTek SeriTek/1SEN2 gets 5 AMUGs out of 5!
The SeriTek/1SEN2 bundle is a great value with very high performance. I have not tested any other enclosure that can get an individual drive performing as well as the SeriTek/1SEN2 does. In addition, the hot swapping drive capability of the 1EN2 PCI card included in this bundle is a "must have" feature for any external SATA drive setup. As SATA drives are the future you might as well enjoy them with this well designed, dual drive, hot-swapping, amazingly fast SeriTek/1SEN2 drive system. FirmTek will be in booth 516 at MacWorld San Francisco, January 10-14, 2005. If you will be at MacWorld stop by their booth. You can see more details on the 1SEN2 at http://store.yahoo.com/firmtek/sata1sen2.html
FirmTek Special Offer - (Requires AMUG Membership)
AMUG Members can save $24.95 on the SeriTek/1SEN2 bundle ($259.95) by ordering it at http://www.store.yahoo.com/firmtek/ and entering the code provided in the AMUG members only area in the comments section of the FirmTek order page. This promotion will end March 31, 2005. FirmTek will adjust the price for the 1SEN2 from $259.95 to $235.00 when the order is processed. AMUG membership is required for this discount to apply.
Contact Information:FirmTek, LLC
PO Box 2352
Union City, CA 94587 USA
sales@firmtek.com
http://www.firmtek.com
Copyright 2004
Arizona Macintosh Users Group, Inc. (AMUG). Visit AMUG at www.amug.org for news, discounts and friends. JOIN AMUG!