EnhanceBox E4 External Storage Hard Drive Array

Testing and Analysis

Our test setup consisted of:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700
Gigabyte EP45T-Extreme
4GB Patriot DDR3
Western Digital 74GB Raptor
Western Digital 74GB Raptor
Sapphire ATI 4870 X2
Cooler Master Cosmos Case
Highpoint RocketRaid 2322

As we mentioned before the EnhanceBox allows you to purchase your E4 or E8 with one of 4 different types of interfaces. The EnhanceBox requires a compatible interface on the PC in order to connect and see the drives or array. Enhance Technology has provided a full listing on their site of compatible cards which is as follows:

Pro’s

We populated the E4 with 4 Seagate 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB cache SATA drives for testing. Your setup can be configured multiple ways and is dependent upon the raid controller you use rather than the E4. We set the drives up in JBOD fashion as the E4 easily fits the file server and mass storage category. I.T. administrators out there will quickly fall in love with the E4 and its big brother the E8’s ability to upgrade easily in terms of drives and storage capacity. Most companies have existing servers and would probably prefer to leverage existing assets rather than spend additional funds into a new server that accepts more drives for increased storage. The E4 and E8 present scenarios with less expenditure, less downtime, increased storage and speed of access, all the while allowing room for growth.

Advanced environments and users can use DFS (Distributed File System)within Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and 2008 in order to gain not only fault tolerance but also site fault tolerance.

From Wikipedia:

Distributed File System (DFS) is a set of client and server services that allow an organization utilizing Microsoft Windows servers to organize many distributed SMB file shares into a distributed file system. DFS provides location transparency and redundancy to improve data availability in the face of failure or heavy load by allowing shares in multiple different locations to be logically grouped under one folder, or DFS root.

Microsoft’s DFS is referred to interchangeably as ‘DFS’ and ‘Dfs’ by Microsoft and is unrelated to the DCE Distributed File System, which held the ‘DFS’ trademark but was discontinued in 2005.

It is also called “MS-DFS” or “MSDFS” in various contexts, e.g. in the Samba Project Samba_(software)

DFS will allow you to bypass the negatives of RAID (rebuilding array’s and lost data in the case of RAID 0) while still making the E4 and E8 appear as one drive for them.  It’s a win/win scenario with the E4 and E8 providing the heart of the storage system.

Con’s

We analyzed the EnhanceBox E4 for a good long time and can honestly say that we were unable to come up with a negative to the use of this system.  The unit provides segmenting from your server/PC and even has a user serviceable replaceable rear mounted 80mm fan in case you should want to replace it with a lower rpm unit that is less noisy. The drives can be locked into the unit for security and to keep unwanted fingers from accidentally removing a drive.

Conclusion

Any company considering the need for an increase in their storage capacity would do well to focus their attention on the E4 and E8. Budget is a BIG concern for all businesses in these times and the E4 shines through with a no compromise solution to increased storage. All things considered for the low price, stellar performance, and multitude of options and configurations the E4 is awarded the TechwareLabs Editors Choice Award.

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