My "Mediasonic USB 3.0 & eSATA 3.5-Inch 4-Bay" Raid enclosure came. Seemed like a very solid and well put together device. Newegg had mostly good reviews on it. A few days later my 4 1TB Western Digital hard drives cames from geeks.com. They were $65 each. A helluva deal. Unfortunately they had an outer "caddy" and DID NOT physically fit into the raid enclosure.
I am not exactly destitute, but my outlay was $450 for a 4TB raid setup that I could use for various mucking around. Not exactly chump change. I tried to get some support, but that was a big strikeout. I really did not want to try and remove the caddy. I really had no other options for buying other drives, and did not want to take a chance on desktop hard drives as there were some folks on newegg talking about problems they encountered that made me wary.
The Mediasonic unit had its own raid controller built into the enclosure. Given the fact that the whole device cost only $200 I suspect the raid controller was not doing the raid in hardware as those controllers (the low end ones) tend to cost more than $200 alone. Still, I was just not trusting going with desktop drives given some of the reviews I read on Newegg.
I returned the drives (pained me to do so). Geek.com was really good about taking them back. Will do business with them again. They have some great deals, especially if you do not mind technology that is a little older.
While I like the Mediasonic enclosure I could not find any information (their forum, the general internet, etc...) that definitively stated they were doing software raid. The whole point of this exercise was to be able to play around with various raid configurations. I could live with a software raid setup, but the lack of information on the subject has been dissapointing.
I will continue to research the subject (though not as diligently) and maybe there will one day be a part three to this.
