Sharkoon 8-Bay RAID-Station - Festplatten-Array - 8 Schächte (SATA-300)

The Sharkoon 8-Bay Raid Station is a very nice product indeed. It's smaller than I had expected: the photos made it look as if it would be the same size as a computer enclosure, but in reality it's significantly smaller.First, the good points: it's well-built and looks pretty. The piano-black metal is covered in a plastic film that's a little fiddly to remove, but once this is done, it looks great. Installation of the drives into the caddies is a doddle.All screws and cables (USB 3.0 and eSATA) are provided, which is a plus.Now the bad points: Despite billing itself as a "Raid Station", its RAID levels are limited. Specifically, it can offer a bunch of single disks (JBOD), a virtual "single large disk" with no redundancy, and two RAID levels.However, these RAID levels are quite limited. There's one that they call RAID 30 (two 4-drive arrays, each with one dedicated parity drive, concatenated into a larger RAID 0 array) and another one they call RAID 50 (two 4-drive arrays with distributed parity, concatenated into a larger RAID 0 array).The problem with either of these is that each subarray only offers one drive's worth of protection: you can lose two drives in the array, as long as they are in different halves. If you lose two drives in the same subarray, you lose everything.I would have expected at least RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6 and RAID 10 to be offered, since different people have different requirements (for example, RAID 50 "loses" 2 drives, but it's slower and offers better redundancy; RAID 10 loses 4 drives, but is faster and offers more redundancy).Another problem is that the JBOD option only works over USB or with an eSATA port with port multiplier capability, which most motherboards don't have, not even recent AMD chipsets that tend otherwise to be very capable.I had purchased an additional eSATA card with port multiplier support for around £20 (specifically, a  StarTech.com 2 Port PCI Express eSATA Controller Adapter Card ) and ended up using software-based RAID6 under Linux using mdadm. This means that I can lose any two drives in the array without data loss.This setup works exceptionally well: the eSATA card was recognised out of the box and gave me eight new /dev/sdX entries, which I was able to set up with no trouble at all. Software-based RAID 6 is surprisingly fast: I get around 30Mb/s write speed, and it has so far been rock solid.It's worth mentioning that, unbelievably, USB 3.0 is actually fast enough to use software-based RAID 6, but this turned out to be rather unreliable: under heavy load, the device would time out every couple of days.Lastly, the power consumption. It's not terrible, but nor is it that great: the whole array, populated with 3TB NAS drives, draws around 70W. If you're paying 0.30 per kWh, like I am, that adds up quite quickly.The RRP currently claims to be £340. I got mine from Amazon for £280, and even that was a little pricey, given that it's not a NAS device.Due to the limitations of the RAID levels offered, I'm knocking off a star, but as long as you are able to find a mode of operation that works for you, and you can get it for the right price, it's a cracking little device. StarTech.com 2 Port PCI Express eSATA Controller Adapter Card

Tremendous enclosure.The positive reviews are correct. This just works as advertised. Simple to configure and built like a tank. The manual is available on their web site, highly recommended.Pro tip: to get a caddy out, the silver catch acts like a switch, move it towards the right and the black plastic cover pops open. Took me a while to figure it out :)I created a Windows Storage Spaces Mirror pool using 7 drives in this enclosure and 4 drives connected to an LSI card. I'm getting 540 Mbps throughput in my backups :)

It's the second enclosure I got for my dad's video collection.It works awesomely well.A certain value for money enclosure. Only drawbacks are the ones mentioned by some other folks concerning the embedded RAID modes.Really cool you don't need anything in RAID 50 although you loose 2/8 drives.If you can't miss any, then you only have 2 choices:1. Use CLEAN mode to have 8 individual files on your system or LARGE mode to have a big drive (summary of the 8 drives you'll put)2. Use CLEAN mode and afterwards a software raid system like "Windows Storage Spaces" in Win10, WinSrv or Linux and mdadm, or UnRaid etc.

Great device, but!Well madeBought mine to work with HP Microserver. With a separate esata controller. Internally this appears to have a JMicron port multiplier which then connects to two more port expanders - one on each of the two four bay backplanes.Unfortunately as I use Linux with my Microserver, I was unable to get this unit to work properly without customising it.In Linux the only way to get this working with all 8 bags is to bypass the internal initial port multiplier you connect to and connect two esata to sata cables from my Microserver to the two backplanes which means either cutting a whole in the case, or running it with the side off as I have done.I suspect the issue here is that The use of daisy chained port multipliers is the problem with Linux, but don't really know.

Don't bother - very disappointed in the enclosure as it only ever saw 1x drive even with 4x same make and model installed. Large mode doesn't work, Clean mode/JBOD doesn't work. Returned for a refund.