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May 5, 2006
Quiet 5 Bay eSATA Port Multiplier Enclosure
A Review of the Sonnet Fusion 500P 5-Bay SATA Hard Drive Enclosure with Port Multiplier
By Arthur Whalem
Sonnet Technologies is shipping the Fusion 500P 5-Bay Serial ATA drive enclosure with port multiplier for $499.95. The Fusion 500P features five hot swap hard drive bays enclosed in a silver aluminum case that is the same color as the PowerMac G5. This port multiplier enclosure setup only requires a single eSATA data connection between the SATA PM host adapter and the enclosure. The Fusion 500P has an internal universal power supply and a single 80mm user serviceable exhaust fan mounted in the rear of the enclosure. It supports both SATA I and SATA II hard drives. The front access door design allows the blue LED drive activity lights and the green LED drive presence lights to be monitored while the Fusion 500P front door is closed. Each drive bay has its own locking mechanism which supports a key. The enclosure measures 11" deep, 8.7" high and 5.9" wide. The Fusion 500P weighs 10.8 pounds empty and 17.6 pounds with five Maxtor 300GB SATA hard drives installed. The enclosure is compatible with Macintosh, Windows or Linux computers with a compatible SATA PM host adapter.
System Requirements
Works with any computer with an external SATA PM interface.
Supports Mac OS X and Windows XP RAID.
Supports up to five external SATA 3.5" hard drives.
Utilizes an eSATA connection.
What's Included?
The Sonnet Fusion 500P enclosure includes the 500P disk enclosure, five 3.5" hard drive trays, drive mounting screws, drive tray keys, a power cord, a one meter eSATA data cable and a users guide.
Rear Connections
The Sonnet Fusion 500P five bay port multiplier SATA enclosure has a power cord outlet on the bottom left side of the case and a power on/off switch just above it. On the bottom right side a single eSATA data cable connects the Fusion 500P to the SATA PM host adapter of your choice. The bottom rear space on the enclosure includes blue LEDs which can be used for hard drive connection troubleshooting.
When lit the single light on the right side indicates that the enclosure is communicating with the host adapter. The other five lights indicate which hard drives are available for use with the port multiplier. All of these rear lights are controlled directly by a 5X1 SATA PM board mounted inside the rear of the Fusion 500P enclosure.Fan Access
The Sonnet Fusion 500P 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 allow the user to remove the fan assembly from the enclosure. This very nice user serviceable fan design allows the fan to be removed without disconnecting any wires. The fan is mounted on a perforated cooling access panel with four screws. The circuit board design on the right side of the assembly allows the fan to plug into the enclosure power socket when the assembly is mounted on the rear of the enclosure. This design allows the user to easily access the fan of the Fusion 500P.
Interface
The Sonnet Fusion 500P uses drive trays which mount the hard drives with four screws on the bottom of the tray. Hard drives are very easy to mount in these trays. In general, I find hot swap trays that use screws on the bottom for attaching 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 your hard drives are mounted in the 500P drive trays you can insert them into the five available hot swap bays. I find the best way to insert the Fusion 500P trays into the enclosure is by pushing the tray all the way into the bay while touching the left side of the tray. Once the tray is all the way in, close the handle to connect the hard drive to the SATA backplane. If the drive clicks into place with a gentle push then the drive is mounted. If a gentle push does not snap the tray in place, then back the tray out a little bit and push it back in so that the tray is out about an 1/8" from the aluminum frame. Try to close the fastener again. The Fusion 500P drive tray has to be lined up just right for the fastener to close properly during the insertion process. Forcing a tray to close is not recommended. The trays are designed to be pushed all the way back into the enclosure and then fastened. While this works most of the time, I find the 500P tray mounting process is a little stiff. It may also require you to push down or up on the tray if the drive will not easily snap into place. Once you get use to the process, the trays in the Fusion 500P mount very securely.
Image courtesy of Sonnet Technology
To eject a drive tray from the Fusion 500P you 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 easily removed from the enclosure. The release mechanism works very well and does not require a key if the bay is left unlocked. You can lock any of the drive bays should you be concerned that someone will remove a hard drive without authorization.
Activity Lights
The Fusion 500P provides a blue activity light that flashes as the hard drives access data. You can see these lights with the enclosure door open or closed. These lights are provided just to the right of each drive bay so that you can easily see which bay is active. A green drive presence LED is also provided. It stays on once a SATA hard drive is detected by the enclosure. Between the ten LEDs on the front of the Fusion 500P and the six on the rear, this enclosure has no shortage of LED indicator lights.
Design
The exterior design of the Sonnet Fusion 500P provides clean lines and a sleek aluminum finish. While the enclosure has a boxy look to it, the aluminum exterior finish is a wonderful match with the
PowerMac G5. In addition, the screen door look on the center of the front drive access panel matches the PowerMac G5 design very well. Having the drive activity lights easily viewable but subdued with the front panel closed is a nice design touch too. The blue LED lights on the back of the enclosure cast a cool blue shadow on the wall behind the enclosure, while providing a nice functional tool for SATA PM system monitoring. I give the Sonnet Fusion 500P high marks for style and visual compatibility with the Apple PowerMac G5.One issue I have found with the Fusion 500P, is that the front drive access panel cannot open when the enclosure is placed on top of an Apple PowerMac G5. This occurs because the PowerMac G5 front handle is in the way. If the 500P front panel started 1.5" higher this problem would not exist. Users that want
to get around this design "feature" can remove the front panel. The hard drive access lights will be a little brighter but hot swapping hard drives will be easier. You can easily detach the front access panel by removing the front left foot from the bottom of the enclosure and loosening the screws on the front bottom lip. You can see the screws in question, circled in red in the image on the left. The front panel will come off easily and can be placed back on at any time. Once you re-attach the foot and tighten the loose screws you are ready to use the enclosure with the front drive access panel off. In this configuration, you can hot swap hard drives in the Fusion 500P while leaving the enclosure on top of the PowerMac G5. The Sonnet Fusion looks nice without the front panel and it provides easy access for those users that hot swap SATA hard drives frequently.Internal Design
The Sonnet Fusion 500P enclosure is not designed for individual SATA hard drive connections. It requires a SATA PM compatible host adapter to work properly with your computer. Up to five individual SATA hard drives share a single cable using fast FIS (Frame Information Structure)-based switching. This system is amazingly fast when you consider the 5X1 data sharing going on. I measured read rates as high as 250MB/sec using the Fusion 500P with five Maxtor 300GB SATA I hard drives.
While the hard drives attach to the front of the SATA backplane, individual SATA cables attach to the rear of the backplane. These cables are connected to a separate port multiplier in the rear bottom of the 500P enclosure. The SATA port multiplier installed in the Fusion 500P looks very similar to the Cool Gear model CGS-3726-A1 port multiplier board. It uses a Silicon Image Sil3726CB Serial ATA II Port Multiplier chip. The SiI 3726 is a 1-to-5 Serial ATA port multiplier designed to provide high speed connections between a single SATA host adapter and five SATA devices. In this review, firmware 1.0115 was installed on the Silicon Image Sil3726CB SATA Port Multiplier chip.Individual backplane boards are used for each drive in the Fusion 500P design, with four pin molex power plugs and 8 to 10" SATA cables between the rear of the backplane and the port multiplier.
Exposed Rear Backplane View
Even though this enclosure design utilizes internal SATA cables it does not seem to impact hard drive performance. In addition, if you ever wanted to turn the Fusion 500P enclosure into a direct connect enclosure later, it could be done by removing the port multiplier and using the primary SATA connectors. While most users will probably never make this modification, having a separate PM board allows for this kind of alteration.
The side aluminum panels of the Fusion 500P easily come off by removing two side screws on the rear of the enclosure. In the image below you can see what the Fusion 500P looks like with the side panels off.
Exposed Side View
If you remove all of the drive trays from the Sonnet Fusion 500P enclosure and look inside the SATA hard drive bay, you can view the backplane that the hard drives connect to. As shown in the image below, five SATA backplane connectors are mounted at the rear of the hard drive bay. Ventilation slots are provided between each SATA backplane board and a 80x80x25mm exhaust fan is mounted behind the hard drive chamber.
Internal Backplane View
Energy Usage
According to the Kill-a-Watt electricity usage monitor, the Sonnet Fusion 500P enclosure uses 10 watts when the enclosure is turned on but empty. Adding a single Maxtor 300GB SATA hard drive increases the energy usage to 20 watts while idle. Once five Maxtor 300GB SATA hard drives are mounted inside the enclosure the power usage increases to 60 watts while idle. When a five drive striped RAID set begins copying lots of data the power usage rises to between 73-74 watts.Stability
A five drive striped RAID mounting stability test was completed with the Sonnet Fusion 500P enclosure using a Sonnet Tempo E4P SATA host adapter and a PowerMac G5 2.5GHz Quad. Five Maxtor 300GB SATA I hard drives were used in a striped RAID set configuration. The five drive RAID set was dismounted from the desktop and all five SATA hard drives were ejected and placed back in the enclosure in a different order. This was done twenty times. If the enclosure was turned off before "hot swapping" the RAID mounted each time. If the enclosure was left on during the hot swap usually the RAID did not mount. This appears to be an issue with the Tempo E4P 2.0 firmware. Page 5 of the 500P users guide indicates users should be able to hot swap drives without turning off the enclosure or the computer. I did not find that method worked reliably with firmware 2.0 when using a striped RAID set. However, if I turned off the enclosure and then hot swapped the drives, the RAID mounted each time when the power to the enclosure was turned on.Individual Drives
When testing the ability of individual SATA hard drives to hot swap inside the Sonnet Fusion 500P, I found that the enclosure and the computer could be left on. During 20 individual hard drive hot swap tests, the hard drives mounted each time without any difficulty.
Cooling
In the cooling tests, the Sonnet Fusion 500P enclosure was tested with a 1.4 TB striped RAID using five Maxtor 300GB SATA hard drives with a PowerMac G5 2.5Ghz Quad. The five drives were worked very hard duplicating a 4.2GB folder of video files up to twenty times simultaneously for 90 minutes. Hardware Monitor 3.4 was used to display the SATA hard drive temperatures. At the end of 90 minutes the Maxtor drives reported temperatures of 114.8 to 120.2 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 Fusion 500P enclosure. After resting for an hour, the Maxtor hard drives reported temperatures of 105.8 to 111.2 degrees Fahrenheit. These tests were done with the front panel closed.
In order to see if the temperatures might change if the drive access door was removed, the enclosure was tested again in that configuration. It was discovered that with the door off, more air is directed through the front lower ventilation port of the enclosure, as it is the path of least resistance. This allowed the hard drive in the lowest bay 5 to be very cool but reduced the amount of air moving between the drive bays. By simply leaving the front door off and covering 50% of the lower ventilation port with black electrical tape the drive temperatures were reduced by 4-6 degrees. This occurs as the exhaust fan starts to pull more air in through the drive bays when the bottom ventilation port is 50% restricted. You can see the temperature results in the table below.Hard Drive Temperatures in Fahrenheit
| Door On | Door Off | Vent 50% | Closed | |||
| Location | After 90 min. | Hour idle | After 90 min. | Hour idle | After 90 min. | Hour idle |
| Top Bay | 114.8 | 105.8 | 116.6 | 109.4 | 109.4 | 104 |
| Bay #2 | 118.4 | 111.2 | 120.2 | 114.8 | 116.6 | 107.6 |
| Bay #3 | 120.2 | 111.2 | 120.2 | 114.2 | 116.6 | 109.4 |
| Bay #4 | 120.2 | 111.2 | 118.4 | 111.2 | 114.8 | 107.6 |
| Bay #5 | 118.4 | 109.4 | 109.4 | 105.8 | 111.2 | 105.8 |
As you can see in the table above, removing the front door from the Fusion 500P and covering 50% of the bottom ventilation port can increase the cooling capability of the enclosure. While the factory cooling setup provided by the Fusion 500P is within most hard drive manufacturers environmental specifications, it is nice to know you can easily improve the cooling characteristics of this SATA PM enclosure.
Custom Cooling
The Sonnet Fusion 500P has a user removable fan assembly that can be used to setup a custom cooling solution. The Fusion 500P is very quiet in its stock configuration. It uses an EverFlow 80X80X25mm fan, model F128025BH. This 12v, 0.19 Amp fan uses 2.16 watts at full power. It has a rated RPM of 2900 and an acoustical rating of 30 dBA. However, the built-in fan connection incorporated in the Fusion 500P design uses a resistor to reduce the speed of the fan significantly. I would prefer that the enclosure design had a 3 way switch or a knob that would allow the user to speed up or lower the fan speed. Many new enclosures are providing user adjustable fan controls.
If you by pass the stock Fusion 500P fan connection by using a 50 cent 3-pin to 4-pin power adapter attached to the top drive bay 4-pin molex connection, you can use any fan at full power. Once I placed the stock EverFlow 80X80X25mm fan on the 3-pin power adapter is was much louder as the RPM was higher. However, the temperatures dropped dramatically. I tested several fans with the front door panel off while leaving the black electrical tape covering 50% of the front ventilation port. The results are shown below for different fan models after 90 minutes of continual activity with a five drive striped RAID set.Hard Drive Temperatures with Direct Powered Fans
| EverFlow | EverCool | pcToys | Panaflow | Enermax | Vantec | |
| Location | F128025BH | EC8015M12CA | 840556014041 | FBA08A12L | UC-8ABS-R | SF8025L |
| Top Bay | 100.4 | 104 | 105.8 | 105.8 | 107.6 | 107.6 |
| Bay #2 | 104 | 107.6 | 109.4 | 109.4 | 111.2 | 111.2 |
| Bay #3 | 104 | 109.4 | 109.4 | 111.2 | 114.8 | 111.2 |
| Bay #4 | 104 | 109.4 | 109.4 | 109.4 | 111.2 | 109.4 |
| Bay #5 | 104 | 107.6 | 109.4 | 109.4 | 111.2 | 109.4 |
| Acoustics | Considerable wind noise 30 dBA | medium, rated at 25 dBA | adjustable RPM, Quiet on 25%, 21 - 41 dBA | Quiet fan rated at 21 dBA | Adjustable RPM knob, on quiet mode, 21-26 dBA | Quiet - 23 dBA |
| Cost | Original Fan | $5.95 | $5.45 | $8.95 | $6.29 | $7.65 |
| Power | 2.16W | 1.92W | 6.5W | 1.2W | 2.88W | 1.2W |
| AirFlow | 32 CFM | 28.5 CFM | 24-52 CFM | 24 CFM | 20-40 CFM | 27 CFM |
| RPM | 2900 | 2500 | 1900-4000 | 1900 | 1200-3000 | 2050 |
As you can see in the table above, if you want the SATA hard drives in the Fusion 500P to operate a few degrees cooler it can be done. It would be awesome if the Sonnet Fusion 500P had a user controllable RPM fan speed knob, so that any user could dial in the fan speed they wanted. However, you can add RPM fan speed control to the Fusion 500P by installing the Enermax UC-8ABS-R fan for less than $10. As you can see in the image on the right, this adds an RPM fan control knob on the outside of the enclosure near the fan opening. With this setup you can keep the enclosure very quiet or turn up the fan to cool down the enclosure quickly. In the future, I believe most high quality enclosures will have user adjustable fan controls as a standard feature.Acoustics
The Sonnet Fusion 500P enclosure uses a single fan. When it is running it produces a slight wind noise. However, if the hard drives in the enclosure are active you are more likely to notice them. If the enclosure is five feet away behind the PowerMac G5 Quad 2.5GHz, I can barely hear the 500P fan while the PowerMac G5 is in sleep mode. Once the PowerMac G5 Quad is turned on it is hard to notice the Fusion 500P fan at all. I would classify the Sonnet Fusion 500P as quiet. The only noise I hear from the 500P is a slight wind noise. Based on my observations the Fusion 500P should do well in noise sensitive environments.
Sleep
The Fusion 500P was tested with the Sonnet Tempo E4P for sleep capability. While this is function of the SATA host adapter its nice to know how the Tempo E4P, PowerMac G5 Quad and the Fusion 500P work together in sleep mode. The Tempo E4P supports sleep mode very well. You can put the Macintosh to sleep while the hard drives are mounted and they are active within a few seconds after awaking from sleep. If you have five Maxtor hard drives in the enclosure while in sleep mode, the Fusion 500P energy usage drops to 53 watts. The Fusion 500P is so quiet that you can barely hear it after the PowerMac G5 is placed in sleep mode.
RAID PerformanceA Sonnet Tempo SATA E4P host adapter using firmware version 2.0 was installed in slot 4 of a PowerMac G5 2.5GHz Quad, running Mac OS X 10.4.6. A Sonnet Fusion 500P five bay port multiplier enclosure with five Maxtor 300GB SATA I hard drives installed as a striped RAID set was used in this test. DiskTester 2.0b2 10GB read and write tests were performed using a run area test so that this article could display how the RAID performs with the E4P. 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 table below displays how the Fusion 500P compared against several other SATA PM enclosures with the same exact hard drives, host adapter and PowerMac G5 2.5GHz Quad.
5 Drive Striped RAID SATA PM Enclosure Performance
 Fusion 500P 7L300S0 |
 SilverSATA V 7L300S0 |
 Addonics 5X1 7L300S0 |
 DATOptic Sbox-P 7L300S0 |
| Area Full | write | read | write | read | write | read | write | read |
| empty | 196 | 253 | 196 | 252 | 195 | 252 | 195 | 253 |
| 10% | 197 | 253 | 197 | 252 | 197 | 252 | 196 | 252 |
| 20% | 197 | 253 | 197 | 251 | 196 | 252 | 196 | 253 |
| 30% | 197 | 252 | 197 | 251 | 196 | 251 | 197 | 252 |
| 40% | 197 | 252 | 197 | 251 | 196 | 251 | 197 | 251 |
| 50% | 197 | 252 | 196 | 249 | 196 | 250 | 196 | 251 |
| 60% | 197 | 243 | 196 | 241 | 196 | 243 | 197 | 243 |
| 70% | 196 | 234 | 196 | 234 | 196 | 235 | 196 | 235 |
| 80% | 196 | 214 | 196 | 214 | 196 | 216 | 197 | 214 |
| 90% | 192 | 186 | 188 | 184 | 191 | 190 | 192 | 186 |
| Average | 196.2 | 239.2 | 195.6 | 237.9 | 195.5 | 239.2 | 195.9 | 239 |
used with a PowerMac G5 2.5 GHz Quad in PCIe slot 4 with each five drive PM setup.
As you can see in the table above all four enclosures perform very similar. With less than 2% difference in performance between enclosures, this easily falls within the margin of error for this test. For all practical purposes the four enclosures provide about the same performance. It is clear from these tests that the hard drive model and the host adapter utilized will have much more of an impact on performance than which SATA PM enclosure you might select.
For those that are wondering how SATA PM performance compares to direct connect enclosures using a single cable per drive setup, you will find that the direct connection is a little faster. In a test using a PowerMac G5 Dual-Core, a Sonnet Tempo E4P and Seagate 160GB 7200.9 SATA hard drives, eight hard drives in a direct connect configuration can out perform ten hard drives in a SATA PM configuration up until the striped RAID set reaches 75% full. The SATA PM performance stays stable while the direct connect configuration slows down as the RAID becomes full. You can see the test data in MB per seconds shown in the chart below.
Results are shown in MB per second. DiskTester was used to generate the results.
Discussion
The Sonnet Fusion 500P SATA PM enclosure provides a small form factor with a width of less than six inches. This is the smallest width SATA enclosure I have tested. In addition, the Fusion 500P provides quiet operation and the ability to utilize different fan configurations. When using the Panaflo, Enermax or Vantec Sealth fan discussed in this article, the Fusion 500P hard drive temperatures were able to stay below 112 degrees Fahrenheit while still maintaining quiet operation. While the WiebeTech SilverSATA V can keep the same hard drives under 102 degrees using the same testing conditions, its fans are louder. The ability of the Fusion 500P enclosure to stay quiet while relatively cool makes it a good choice for noise sensitive computing environments.The small form factor, quiet operation, LED activity lights, user removable fan assembly, ease with which hard drives can be screwed into the drive trays, rear trouble shooting LEDs and a beautiful drive access bay door, make the Fusion 500P one of my favorite SATA PM enclosures.
The only real draw back with the Fusion 500P is that drive trays can be tight fitting in the enclosure. Keeping the drive screws snug and not being in a hurry when inserting hard drives into the enclosure can help alleviate tray insertion issues. If the hard drive will still not go in, pushing the tray down while inserting it helped ease the mounting process with the enclosure tested in this article.
Pros
Works with any OS with SATA PM capability.
Mounts up to five external SATA hard drives.
FIS-based Port Multiplier-aware hardware.
Single data cable for mounting up to five drives.
Small foot print.
Quiet operation.
User serviceable fan module.
LED activity lights and rear LED PM lights.
Looks great with a PowerMac G5.
User-upgradeable firmware.
Easy access enclosure for modifications.
Easily mounts single 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)
Drive tray insertion may seem stiff.
Bottom air vent should be smaller to help increase airflow to drive bays.
Port multiplier may be slower than one cable per drive method.
Sonnet Fusion 500P gets 4.5 AMUGs out of 5!
If the Sonnet Fusion 500P hard drive trays were a little easier to insert into the enclosure this would be a five AMUG rating. There are many nice features provided with the Fusion 500P that are hard to find in any other single SATA PM enclosure. The style is very nice, the enclosure is very quiet, fan modifications allow you to make it run even cooler, it has a very small foot print, the drive access and SATA PM LEDs are awesome and the side panels can easily come off for those that like to make modifications. The Fusion 500P will run fine right out of the box but its design allows those that like to tinker the ability to make it even better. The Fusion 500P is a top pick for users that want a quiet SATA PM enclosure. If you are in the market for a SATA PM enclosure the Sonnet Fusion 500P is definitely worth considering.
Contact Information:
Sonnet Technologies, Inc.
8 Autry
Irvine, California 92618-2708 USA
Phone: 1-949-587-3500
sales@sonnettech.com
Copyright 2006
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