Mac Fan - 2013/Mar
A magical box that can help organize extra used drives!
When I was cleaning out my place, i found many used drives and decided that I need to put them in order. The most reasonable way to do so is to put these drives into a multi-bay enclosure. However, once a drive becomes defective, all data will be lost. Plus, I use these drives for temporary storage and Time Machine. Thus, I want a multi-bay RAID enclosure with Thunderbolt speed.
Although I prefer the Pegasus R4 due to my needs, it's sold with drives included. Then, I was given a chance to play with the Data Watch Technologies' RS-M4T, which is also a 4-bay enclosure with Thunderbolt interface.
When considering both cost and performance, obviously the USB 3.0 is better. However, the Thunderbolt speed is best. So if you have alot of drives or want the best speeds, then the RS-M4T is the best choice right now.
It was easy to configure with MAC's Disk Utitlity when I set 1 drive for Time Machine and 2 drives under Mirroring mode for important data. If the drive is already formatted for MAC, it's available for immediate usage as soon as the RS-M4T is turned on.
The RS-M4T is small like a PC. If it's placed near you, it might be a bit noisy because there are fans inside, but shouldn't bother you too much. The cooling feature is very effective. Even if there are 4 drives installed and running constantly, the drives remain around 30C. Therefore, there's no need to worry about drives overheating.
I gave the RS-M4T read/write performance tests with several different settings. When using a regular 7200RPM 3.5" drive and MAC's OS RAID software, the speed is around 200MB/S. If it is set to RAID 0, the speed will increase to at least 600MB/S, which is actually higher than SSDs. However, since the RS-M4T comes with its own RAID configuration software, it'll provide more stable performances if used.
The RAID configuration software that comes with the RS-M4T supports RAID 0, 1, and 10.
When considering both cost and performance, obviously the USB 3.0 is better. However, the Thunderbolt speed is best. So if you have alot of drives or want the best speeds, then the RS-M4T is the best choice right now.