This 5-bay station is the aesthetically beautiful effect. The installation disks from the front is convenient and easy. The block of 250 W and 120 mm however ventolo generates a noise that could be unpleasant for some. The eSata rates are quite correct. In "LARGE" mode, the physical drives are concatenated into a single virtual volume whose capacity equals the sum of the capacities of physical disks. But be careful! It is not possible to "expand" an existing virtual volume. We should see that this resort gives "CLEAN" mode with a multiplier card ports because anyway native home, this mode does not work with my motherboard Gigabyte Socket FM2. We would like also to have more information from Sharkoon on Port Multiplier compatible hosts. One also wonders what is the basis of port multipliers of this station (FIS Base or not), it seems to be marked anywhere. See use and all Raid mode would be to test (R0, R1, R3, R5, R10) and the CLONE mode. Commentary 05/12/2013 After a few months of use, I note that this product is solid and reliable. Used with eSATA bracket provided on the wearing of a motherboard from an old PC socket 775 recycled Windows Home Server 2011, this station configured in RAID10 (4 3TB drives in RAID1 + 1 disk 3 TB in Hotspare) makes the job by performing backup of client computers. Too bad, I say shame, no disk management tool (CrystalDiskInfo, or even HDTune Hard Disk Sentinel Pro) can follow the individual smart health status of each disk. Maybe one day Sharkoon integrate this kind of internal software product for monitoring the condition of the discs, which would give it 5 stars. Rectification of 12.07.2013 Hard Disk Sentinel and its latest versions can give an individual health status of each disk, which is not the case (but perhaps not only) for Sharkoon 8 bay.
