StarTech.com 8-bay USB 3.0 / eSATA Removable Hard Drive Enclosure Review

Miscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks

The single 120mm fan had no trouble keeping the temperatures of the SSDs inside the enclosure within acceptable limits during the course of benchmarking. Obviously, hard drives require more airflow. Thankfully, the ventilated front panel and the drive tray ensure this. That said, having two fans (one behind each set of four drives) could have resulted in a better thermal solution. The 2x 80mm fan approach adopted by Mediasonic may result in better airflow, but it does result in higher sound levels. There is a trade-off, and StarTech.com has gone for the quieter single fan solution.

The table below presents the power consumption of the unit recorded under different scenarios. Note that the eight disks mentioned in the table below are all 240GB Intel SSD DC S3150 drives.

The StarTech.com 8-bay hard drive enclosure with hot-swap support lends itself to multiple use-cases:

• A simple JBOD enclosure for users with large amounts of data that need to be accessed from a single machine
• A safe storage place for old hard drives
• Enable easy decommissioning and/or data recovery from most common COTS NAS units

Touching upon the last point further, I would like to point readers to our article that dealt with data recovery from a failed NAS. In that piece, I had spent considerable time attempting to free up the SATA ports on the motherboard. Since then, I have attempted data recovery from the disks of multiple NAS units. I soon found that things were greatly simplified by slotting in the disks in an enclosure like the Mediasonic Probox or the StarTech.com 8-bay DAS that we are talking about today. It enables data recovery even on machines like the Intel NUCs which don't have any spare SATA ports. This could be achieved by connecting the DAS via eSATA or USB 3.0 and reassembling the RAID volume from within the OS. In essence, a high bay-count DAS unit is an indispensable tool in the arsenal of any power user.

The product does have scope for improvement. Though visual inspection made the unit appear strong and robust, we found after a few days of use that the front panel had loosened up considerably and could almost be taken out of the chassis (only held back by the wires behind the bottom of the front panel). It would be nice to have better build quality and materials. The hard drive trays are very good for keeping the member disks ventilated. However, the drive tray opening mechanism is not exactly intuitive. The final improvement aspect that needs to be addressed is the power consumption. In particular, consuming upwards of 27W at idle with no disks attached appears way too high. The product page also doesn't make it clear that a SATA chipset with port multiplier support is needed for accessing multiple disks in the array over an eSATA connection.

Coming to the pricing segment, we find that the comparable Mediasonic Probox comes in at $270. The Probox was recently updated to support SATA III drives at 6 Gbps. The StarTech.com S358BU33ERM is priced at $392 on their website. However, Newegg and Amazon are selling the same unit for $311  and $309 respectively. For the premium over the Mediasonic Probox, the consumer gets a better designed chassis with easily accessible ports that also happens to operate quietly.