Mediasonic PRORAID 4 Bay 3.5" SATA Hard Drive Enclosure - USB 3.0 & eSATA 12TB Support (HFR7-SU3S2)

Wanted a cheap Pi based NAS and this works perfectly. Unit shipped with a non-vented door. Vendore replied within 24 and promised to ship a vented door. Received the new door in a few days and replaced quickly and easily. Definitely not the highest quality hardware, but I was looking for a simple and cheap external RAID enclosure. So far, this is working perfectly and support has been great.

I've reached out to Mediasonic to resolve this issue, and I will update once that is resolved. It will be worth 5 stars if it is, because other than this issue the product seems great. I set up 4 8TB WD Red drives in a RAID-5 array. Read speeds are great, however I noticed while migrating data that the write speeds started off slow (~70MBps) and dropped to an insane ~5MBps with larger files once they hit a certain point (I'm not sure of the exact point, but probably somewhere around 3GB). (UPDATE: The threshold is actually 4GB) In reading the Mediasonic forums, it appears that drives larger than 6TB are only supported in HW Rev 3 of the product. The one I received is not Rev 3 (there is no revision noted on the back, exactly like the person who reported the issue in the forum). There is no indication of this issue in the product description or the manual that comes with the product - everything simply says that it supports drives up to 12TB. (UPDATE: Rev 3 only applies to the HFR2-SU3S2 so that is irrelevant to this issue) I've reached out to Mediasonic, and I'll update the review when that process is complete. I've heard good things about Mediasonic support, so I hope that the resolution will be a positive one rather than returning the product in favor of a different RAID solution altogether. UPDATE: After working with Mediasonic, I'm going to exchange the unit for another one. We ran through a ton of different troubleshooting steps, but to no avail. One thing to note is that the write speeds are the same whether I use eSATA or USB 3. That definitely points to something funky going on rather than an issue with, say, driver/firmware/chipset incompatibility. I'm still holding off changing the star rating until it's resolved one way or another. UPDATE 2: Replacing the unit did not resolve the issue. At this point I'm going to just deal with it and raise it to a 2-star review (I reserve 1-star reviews for stuff that is totally unusable and has to be returned). To sum up, I tried the unit connected to the following: - Built-in Marvell eSATA controller - PCIe ASMedia eSATA controller - Built-in USB 3.0 controller The write speeds, per AJA System Test, were 5-6MBps no matter how it was connected. I recreated the array per Mediasonic's suggestion, but that provided no improvement. The only thing that remained constant was the drives themselves, however I tested them in single mode and the write speeds were great. This is purely an issue with RAID-5 mode. Mediasonic support was great, even though my issue was not resolved. They definitely tried their best. UPDATE 3: After changing absolutely nothing, the write speeds have improved. While they're still not great (~30MBps in disk test tools, ~20MBps in real-world file copy tests), they're a fair sight better than they were. This makes the device eminently more usable, and I will add a star to my rating. The whole ordeal makes me wonder if there's something about this device that requires a couple of weeks to settle in before its I/O works up to its potential. UPDATE 3: I had to replace a failed hard disk in the RAID-5 array, and found another serious issue with the enclosure. Rebuilding takes forever, and renders the logical volume practically unusable. I thought it was just a quirk of my setup, but I found people on YouTube describing exactly the same thing. Mediasonic estimates about an hour to rebuild 200GB. My array is 24TB, so I'm looking at five days to complete the rebuild, and thus five days that the data on the array will be practically inaccessible. I should note that the data is *there*, it's just that both read and write are so slow that they cause timeouts for any applications that try to use data stored there. I hope I'm not jinxing myself, but I really hope that there isn't another drive failure in the insanely long time it's going to take this rebuild to finish.

Received the ProRaid and was up and running with a 15TB RAID 5 array in less than 30 minutes. Using USB3 on a Mac Mini the transfer speeds from another USB3 device are around 100-130mbs for a 4TB total file transfer. Device is extremely quiet and works exactly as advertised.

Had unit operational on Windows 10 with 4ea 2Tb drives, after 5 months it now powers itself off and is corrupting data on the drives. I have contacted Mediasonic, and asking for a replacement and will report here what they say regarding this issue. I have purchased Mediasonic Proraid boxes in the past and they all worked flawlessly. This is the first time I have had a failure. Could be a bad one or it could be a bad design or factory run. Hope Mediasonic stands behind their product. UPDATE - Mediasonic or Amazon, not sure which as I can't determine who sent me a brand new unit today! I have to say I am speechless, as I really had no expectation that my request would be taken seriously.....but apparently it was! Thank you for standing behind this product and making this customer very happy! I have updated my review rating to reflect the awesome customer service I have recieved. Thank you!!!!!!

So far so good. Set up wasn't too difficult though the instructions were not great. Once I got the RAID type I wanted my computer recognized it as 1 drive and I am transferring my data over at 45mbps.

Super easy to set RAID levels, I like that it has hardware RAID features built-in. This works great to connect to my QNAP NAS for additional storage. Performance is good and I'm happy with the quality and convenience.

Set up this unit today and started a lengthy load. After a while I started to smell hot electronics. When I opened the front door, the hard drives were too hot to touch. The fan was running at 2 in Auto mode so I set it to 3 in Manual and closed the door. Still too hot. If I leave the front door open and the fan on high, it's ok bu in Auto mode or with the door closed, it runs way too hot. In the older HFR2-SU3S2, there is a vent on the bottom of the front door and louvers that force the air up and across the hard drives and out the back. On the newer HFR7-SU3S2, they have removed the vent and there is no longer any airflow over the drives. I will be returning this unit. Mediasonic PRORAID 4 bay 3.5" SATA Hard Drive Enclosure - USB 3.0 & eSATA 10TB Support (HFR7-SU3S2)

I have the 2 bay unit and it is extremely fast. I'm a bit underwhelmed by my Proraid. It's not exactly fast. My disks are very fast when connected in RAID5 on a physical PC with a RAID controller, but this was to make it possible to use on more than one computer. Since it isn't that fast, we eventually put it on the network since having a gigabit Limit wouldn't matter, I can barely read and write to this thing at 25MB/s... Individually, the disks can Rad/Write at 155MB/s, in a RAID5 on a proper RAID controller, the read/write is 230MBs/90MBs respectively. In the Probox in RAID5 mode, the disks Read/Write continuously at 45MBs/27MBs with bursting to 150MBs/65MBs at the start of a file transfer. I gave 3 stars because even at the lower speed in the Probox, It still is only holding Media for a Plex server. So speed isn't a really high requirement only a preference for moving content to and from the unit. It works well, but isn't fast. Like a Toyota.