Enhance Technology T4H CR Desktop RAID Storage System Review

The pervasiveness of USB and the availability of high speed connections like Firewire and eSATA have made external hard drive solutions more viable than ever before. Systems can become smaller without sacrificing storage capacity or performance. Although plugging in a drive instantly gives you more room to store your stuff, what it does not give you is redundancy for your precious data. When a single drive fails, your stuff is gone. Enhance Technology, a leader in external storage systems, fired over a solution called the T4H CR EnhanceRAID that is sure to please not only your appetite for speed, but also your need for data redundancy.

Features

The Enhance Technology T4H CR posses an impressive list of features that will have any storage geek drooling. Because the unit is OS Independent, plugging it into an eSATA port turns it into a regular hard drive, which means that you could technically install other operating systems onto it in addition to using it as external storage. In addition to eSATA support, the unit also offers other connectivity options which include USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 and 800, making it ideal for notebook users or Mac users.

The unit supports RAID levels 0 for performance, 1 for redundancy, and 5 for users that want both, which will be the focus of our testing today. This is accomplished using a Hot-Swappable 4 x Removable HDD Trays. Each tray also gives Power & Access LED indicators as well as the ability to lock each one to ensure that they don’t get popped out by accident.

What’s Inside the Box?

Because the solution is built with the enterprise level or high performance user in mind, it came to us in a well packaged plain cardboard box. What we got inside was pretty much everything we’d ever need to get it going except for your hard drives of choice.

• Firewire 800 Cable
• Firewire 400 Cable
• eSATA Cable
• USB 2.0 Cable
• Power cable
• Serial 9 Pin Cable (for flashing firmware)
• Keys for locking drive trays
• Four Hot Swap Drive Trays and Drive Mounting Hardware
• Quick Start Guide and CD Manual

I was very pleased to see every possible cable you would need to connect this enclosure to any system you wanted. However, the inclusion of a 9 pin serial cable for firmware flashing really makes no sense in this day and age. Part of the package, but not included as a tangible item is an Enhance Technology 3 year warranty.

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First Impressions

After rescuing the unit from its substantial micro-cellular foam packaging, I was taken back by just how beefy and robust the unit seemed. I like well built stuff and I’m sure you do too.

The hot swap trays that you use to mount your hard drives of choice were definitely precision pieces. They came encased in their own micro-cellular prison and were spaced even apart to prevent damage in shipping. Each one was identical and there were no manufacturing anomalies to speak of. The front of each unit houses the quick release latch which is attached to a very strong spring. I’ve noticed in the past with some hot swap trays that had weak springs, they would no longer eject after leaving them in service for a long time. This strong spring ensures that when it comes time to swap out that bad drive, you’ll have a bay that will actually eject. Important don’t you think?

The “H” in the T4H CR’s name is for the aluminum handle that sits atop the unit. The handle is sturdy and doesn’t wiggle when provoked, making it ideal for carrying around the unit from place to place.

Enhance Technology has fitted the T4H CR with an LED control panel. This control panel gives you the 411 on your array and assists you in setting up the array to your needs. Buttons underneath it allow you to toggle through its various screens.

Moving to the back, we see the T4H CR’s impressive array of connectivity options, making this unit work with pretty much any system you can think of, be it Mac, PC, or other. You get two Firewire 800 ports so that you can daisy chain another device in if you wish. I still can’t figure out why they would use a Serial Port for firmware updates. I can’t remember the last system I built with a serial port. This is also where you find the main power switch and the main power connector.

The T4H CR also has an 80mm fan on the back that supplies a constant stream of air to the drives and the components. This unit is easy to remove via two thumb screws to aid in cleaning or replacement.

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Inside the T4H CR

After removing the fan assembly, you can see the backplane where the drives mate with the T4H CR. Components seem high quality throughout.

Before installing all the trays, we were able to take a peek at the controller down below which resembles a small computer with its own backup battery. This isn’t too far from the truth since the system does boot up and do its own POST internally upon start up.

The backplane looked like it could support SAS drives. Curious, I decided to toss one in there to see if the controller would recognize it. Not surprisingly, that was a negative, but I did try.

System Setup

In order to setup the Enhance Technology T4H CR for testing, we enlisted the help of Seagate Technology who graciously provided us four of their enterprise level ES.2 Barracuda 1 TB hard drives for our enjoyment. Other system specifications included:

• AMD Phenom 9900E 2.6GHz Quad Core CPU (Provided by AMD)
• Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe/WiFi-AP 790FX Motherboard (Provided by ASUS)
• CORSAIR XMS2 DHX 4GB DDR2-800 Memory Kit (Provided by CORSAIR)
• Sapphire ATOMIC HD3870 Video Card (Provided by Sapphire)
• Western Digital Velociraptor WD3000GLFS Hard Drive (Provided by Western Digital)
• HighSpeedPC Top Deck Tech Station (Provided by HighSpeedPC)
• ANTEC Quattro 1000 Watt Power Supply (Provided by ANTEC)

Initializing That RAID…

The whole setup process is done completely system independent. Following the quick step guide, we inserted each drive one by one. Once that was done, the LED panel asked if we wanted to set this bad boy up. Now this is where things get a little funny. You see, the enclosure doesn’t give you the option to go RAID 0 or 0+1 if you have four 1 TB drives. It automatically defaults to RAID 5. Since RAID initialization takes 7 hours, it was a royal pain to only find that out after fiddling with it for the third time. RAID 5 it is!

Also worth noting is that if you are using big bad 1 TB drives, only 2 TB total will be recognized when using USB 2.0 or Firewire 400/800. So if you want to see all of your storage, you need to be using the T4H CR with eSATA only.

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Performance

After seven hours of initialization (yes, and I did that more than once), we’ve got an array that is just under 3 TBs, and we were ready to see what this four drive monster could do in the benchmarks with RAID 5. But before we get into that, we’ll lay down the single drive benchmarks for your reference on our Seagate Barracuda ES.2 1 TB SATA Drives.

Now that we’ve seen the read and write speeds of the single Seagate ES.2 1TB drive, let’s see how well or not so well the T4H CR does against a single drive. Now, keep in mind, RAID 5 is built for data redundancy so it will be interesting to see what kind of performance hit, if any there is vs single drive performance.

eSATA Performance

Connecting up the eSATA connector, we ran another set of read and write tests, this time on the T4H CR and the four drives running in RAID 5 inside. Let’s see how it did:

It’s definitely no speed demon that’s for sure. In fact, it fails to match the single drive speeds in all categories (with the exception of CPU usage in write speeds). I had thought that maybe it would perform better if we had used smaller drives and setup a RAID 0 array, but even Enhance Technology’s own benchmarks would beg to differ as they show minimal performance gains between RAID 5 and RAID 0. I even tried plugging the T4H CR into a different SATA port, but we only got similar results. Let’s keep rolling I guess!

Firewire 800 Performance

As expected, Firewire 800 performance is worse than eSATA performance, however, disk access times and CPU usage are in favour of Firewire 800 in both the read and the write tests.

Firewire 400 Performance

I expected Firewire 400 performance to be worse than Firewire 800 performance. Instead, I got some really strange results where they were nearly identical except for one thing: Firewire 800 performed worse than Firewire 400 in minimum read and write speeds. Just to be sure that nothing was wrong with my controller card, a SIIG PCI-Express Firewire 800/400 card, I hooked up a Western Digital MyBook Studio Edition via Firewire 400 and 800 and benched that on the same card. I got what I expected which was far superior Firewire 800 performance over Firewire 400. Could this have something to do with the fact that the controller onboard could only allow access to 2TB total?

USB 2.0 Performance

As expected, USB 2.0 performance sits at the bottom of the scale. It’s faster than a USB Flash Drive, for sure, but it’s nothing worth writing home about. It does have the lowest CPU utilization of any USB based drive that I’ve tested so far so write home about that if you will.

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Final Thoughts

The Enhance Technology T4H CR Desktop RAID storage system wasn’t the runaway hit that I was expecting it to be. On paper though, with it’s impressive array of connectivity options and OS transparency, I was really expecting this to be the hot ticket when it came to external storage. Instead, I was impressed with some aspects, but really disappointed with others.

On the impressed side, I really thought the build quality was top notch. The handle on top wasn’t some after thought and it really felt secure. All the drive bays were precision pieces and slid in and out with no problems. I particularly liked the strong spring used in the quick release mechanism, ensuring that one day, you will be able to eject your disk. The key lock feature was also a nice touch to prevent a drive form being popped out. If this happens, the array requires another seven hours to rebuild that disk. I also liked the fact that every cable you need was included so you can take advantage of all the great connectivity options.

Now it’s time to get disappointed, but we’ll start slow. One thing that sort of bugged me was the fact that the main door, which is a very nicely machined piece by the way, was not lockable. Instead, two thumb screws are used to secure the door, however, this still leaves the control panel open for tampering. To complete the security solution, this needs to be lockable. There was also nowhere to stick a security lock to attach this thing to something, so someone doesn’t take it by the quality handle and run off with it.

Finally, I really have to rip on the performance. Now, I do realize that RAID 5 does provide exceptional data security, and if you want something that you know won’t die and take all your data with it, then this is a great feature. However, coupled with that is the hideously long 7 hr build time, initially, and subsequently when you replace a drive. Also, the performance lagged behind a single drive so much that I really started to wonder if something was wrong, but in its defense, the specifications do say that 80 MB/s is the maximum speed, but that’s still way slower than a single drive.

This brings me to my final area of criticism. I figured, well, for a… I don’t know… at $500 for the box with no drives, this would be a fantastic addition for anyone who wants a very secure way to store their stuff, but wants something speedier than a Network Attached Storage system. Well, it is faster than a NAS, but this is no $500 box. I checked around and found out that this enclosure, bare bones, hits the streets at over $1000. This puts it into NAS territory WITH drives.

Now granted, you do pay for the quality and it is a quality product, but something inside me hurts when I hear that you’re laying down a grand for this, but I guess for some, that pain is worse if you lose all your data. If it knocked my socks off in performance, I’m sure I could get over the pain, but it doesn’t.

Pros

• High quality build
• Multiple connectivity options via Firewire, USB 2.0 and eSATA
• OS Transparency makes setup a breeze
• Multiple RAID modes to suit your needs (if not using 1 TB drives)