welcome to my unboxing of the medi Sonic prob box h82 DS3
S2 I think what they mean to say is it's an 8X it's an 8 bay USB 3 external hard
drive enclosure and there's a couple things that are pretty cool about it so I'm going to run through everything
media Sonic has to say about it and then I'm going to tell you what I think is
interesting so first of all it supports eight hard drives of different brand and
capacity you can throw whatever you want in there although with an enclosure like
this I don't think I'd really recommend it okay it supports up to 24 terabytes
yes that's 3 terabytes time 8 Bays it
has one button interface selection so you can flexible alternative interface
selection by simply pressing the button ah yes so the interface uh meaning
either eat or USB 3 because it does support both of those transfer methods
it's got a security lock because you don't want people running along and stealing your hard drives Force
convection process for cooling power sync Powers off and on synchronized with
the PC that's very handy because you don't need to access data that's plugged
in by eata unless the system is powered on very nice supports hard drive hot
swap need hard drive supported and smart fan comes with auto
manual modes three levels of speed for best
convention supports Windows 7 e USB 3
we've mentioned that before all right moving along to the side we see what it
looks like from the back moving along to the back we see what it looks like from
the front and the side so far this is all stuff that's been covered Force
convection process power sync one
button okay moving back along to the other side okay hold on a minute ah here
we go this is interesting here is a comparison chart so we're showing USB 3
versus E versus USB 2 usb2 is slow es is
fast and USB 3 is super speed so in Practical terms um USB 3 and
eSATA probably aren't going to give you much of a difference in terms of
performance because the way I would install drives in an enclosure like this
is going to be um well not able to
saturate a an ESAT connection so these are all theoretical maximums that you
see in that graph on the back so let's go ahead and open it up and don't worry
I will tell you the part about what I think is interesting about it coming
soon first the accessories so the first
accessory is an ESAT cable very nice
next accessory is a usb3 cable that's a to
B oh cameraman says it is a Mac
compatible so thank you for that cameraman next we have hard drive rails
including a screwdriver for you to install set rails and screws for you to
install all head rails next we have a power supply cable so the power supply
is built right into the unit which is nice because you don't have to deal with
that external power brick nonsense okay
we've got nice closed cell foam very very thick so you got like almost 2 Ines
of foam on every side of the unit so I wouldn't worry too much about it being
damaged and try wow it's heavy once you
load this thing up with hard drives it's going to weigh like a ton all right open
this baby up
okay there it is the pro box 8 bay USB 3
esad a hard drive enclosure so why don't we start at the
front since that's a very natural place to start how do you open it you know
what why don't I open it first give me a sec so by plugging in the key here I can
unlock
Aha and open the door so you can see I
can uh remove my hard drive cage doors
then I install my rails on the drives and then I throw the drives back into
here so I am finally going to tell you what I think is so cool about this
enclosure this enclosure includes an8
Port multiplier so what that means is if
you want to access all of the
SATA ports so that is the eight ports
you can do that whole thing through a single eat interface back here or usb3
interface the eSATA one is more interesting to me though so a port
multiplier this is not a raid box this is just a straight one SATA to eight
SATA port multiplier which is great because compared to competing Solutions
which might have two e SATA interfaces on the back and then two four port
multipliers this allows you to configure array across up to eight drives using a
single port so you can actually plug this in to your Intel uh to your Intel
controller assuming your board uses the Intel controller for its eata and you
can configure like an eight Drive raid five for example which is awesome now if
the Intel controller is not fast enough for you you don't want to use like a software mode you can actually take
proper raid cards and you can plug them into one port here now you're going to
be bandwidth Limited in terms of the single EA connection but even eight
drives in like a raid five or a raid six shouldn't be bottlenecked too much by an
ESAT 300 megabit per second connection
so or did I say three I meant three um 3
gbit per second connection shouldn't be bottleneck too much so that means that
you are going to have excellent performance to up to eight drives at a
time so cameraman is showing us the ESAT and the USB 3 uh indicators the fan
indicators as well as the ESAT and usb3 indicators okay I'm not sure which
is which okay finally we have the interface change button the sync button
and the fan button so these are all the uh LEDs and what knots another thing
that's interesting about this particular Drive enclosure is that it looks very
nice see it's got like a nice matte black finish going on there on the back
we can see two 80 mm fans and what's cool about those fans is they are easily
user replaceable yes media Sonic will not void you or your warranty for
replacing those fans with something else I think that is a great feature right
there there's our built-in power supply down there at the bottom that's part of
what gives the unit its weight finally at the back we have a Kensington lock
right here so that uh nobody just runs along steals your whole 24 tbte Tower of
precious family memories and then runs off with it and I think that is pretty
much everything I wanted to say about this 8 bay hard drive tower so I'm going
to go ahead close it up take the key and swallow it