MD4 eSATA

MD4

High quality 4-Bay rack mount chassis engineered to perform, not only for speed but also to maximize the storage capacity and secure your data. This industrial enclosure is designed to house up to four 3.5" SATA hard drives and provides efficient passive heat dissipation, plus extra powerful rear fans to keep your hard drives cool during long hours of operation. Advanced RAID technology provides extra protection for all your valuable data content and the hot swap rack allows easy replacement for faulty drives.

Features

• Configurable hardware RAID controller (Non-RAID ,JBOD, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10)
• Fully hardware accelerated RAID engine (rebuild speed 200GB/hour)
• RAID 5 write-back cache to enhance performance
• Supports SATA II Gen2i/m specification with 3.0Gbps and 1.5Gbps data rates
• Smart fans that automatically regulate fan speed according to the internal temperature
• Smart Fans (automatically regulates fan speed according to the internal temperature)
• Externally accessible "Hot Swap" removable rack

4-Bay RAID in a slim, low-profile rack

This 1U rack mount enclosure is designed to house up to four 3.5" SATA hard drives with the option to set the RAID configuration yourself, depending on your system requirements. Use it as a reliable backup for your important data with RAID 1/10, for optimal performance and speed with RAID 0 striping, or select RAID 5 for the perfect balance between high performance and data integrity. In case of a drive failure, the externally accessible hot swap rack makes installing and replacing the hard drives quick and easy.

High speed eSATA connection

This 19" rack mount chassis comes with a high speed eSATA connection, providing fast data throughput ideal for large data transfers and daily backups. To keep your drives cool during long hours of operation, this enclosure uses inXtron's smart fan technology. It automatically regulates the fan speed according to the internal temperature, optimizing cooling and reducing noise levels.

Non-RAID (Port Multiplier)

The drives show up as independent volumes. Each drive can be formatted and accessed separately. If one drive fails, the others are not affected. This setting does not provide any performance or redundancy benefits.

1-4 hard drives

JBOD (Disk Spanning)

The drives show up as one large single volume, combining the capacities of all drives. Spanning is an array (not RAID) that is written sequentially across the drives. By itself, it does not provide any performance or redundancy benefits. It is ideal for drives with different capacities, making use of the maximum storage capacity. However, if one drive fails, the whole array becomes corrupted.

1-4 hard drives

RAID 0 (Disk Striping)

The drives are shown as one large single volume but the total size will depend on the drive with the smallest capacity. This setting is used where speed is the primary objective but RAID Level 0 (also called striping) is not redundant. This form of array splits each piece of data across the drives in segments; since data is written without any form of parity data-checking, it allows for the fastest data transfer of all other modes. On the downside, if one drive fails, the whole array becomes corrupted.

2-4 hard drives

RAID 1 (Disk Mirroring)

Two drives show up as one volume but only 50% of the total capacity, depending on the drive with the smallest capacity, can be used. RAID 1 creates an exact copy (or mirror) of a set of data on the second drive. This is useful when reliability and backup take precedence over storage capacity. Should one hard drive fail, it can be replaced and the data rebuilt automatically. When more than two drives are installed, the remaining drives will show up as independent volumes.

2 hard drives

RAID 10 (Disk Mirroring with Striping)

The drives are shown as one volume but only 50% of the total capacity, depending on the drive with the smallest capacity, can be used. RAID 1 creates an exact copy (or mirror) of a set of data. This is useful when reliability and backup take precedence over storage capacity. When one hard drive fails, it can be replaced and the data rebuilt automatically.

4 hard drives

RAID 5 (Disk Striping with Parity)

The drives are shown as one volume but the total capacity, depending on the drive with the smallest capacity, is the combined size minus the size of one drive. RAID 5 uses block-level striping with parity data distributed across all member disks and therefore provides the perfect balance between high performance and data integrity. When one hard drive fails, it can be replaced and the data rebuilt automatically.

3 hard drives
4 hard drives

Remarks

• The difference in performance is only visible for fast interfaces like eSATA.
• For RAID 0/1/10/5, hard drives of identical capacities are recommended. If the capacity is different, the total amount of the space that can be used will depend on the drive with the smallest capacity.
• It is not possible to add more drives to an existing RAID array without re-formatting. When adding additional drives at a later point, they will be mounted as independent volumes until the "MODE Change" button has been pressed again and the drives have been re-formatted.

• User manuals
• High resolution images
• Frequently asked questions
• HDD compatibility list

Accessories

Extra HDD trays available on request (P/N: MD4-NAS-T)
Carton Size: 46.5.cm x 39.5cm x 35.8cm (40pcs per carton)

Benchmark

Test Environment

PC: Motherboard Asus P5AD2-E Premium v1.05, Intel Pentium 4, CPU 3.0GHz, 512GB RAM, eSATA host controller Sil3132, Windows Vista Home Premium 32bit - FDBench v1.02
Mac: MacPro, Intel Xeon Quad Core, CPU 2.8GHz, 4GB RAM, eSATA host controller Sil3124, OS 10.5.5 - Quickbench v4.0
HDD: 4x Hitachi 1TB (HDS721010KLA330)

eSATA

Remarks

The lower performance on Windows compared to the Mac is due to the motherboard and host controller; it does not support the AHCI mode and only runs on IDE mode. It should be noted that this is not related to the MD4 eSATA or the Operating System.