Installation

As noted earlier neither case came with printed instructions. After about twenty minutes looking for the non-existent instructions we got out the CD and printed off the easy to understand icon and text based instructions.

Here is a summary of the instructions:

1 - Remove the 4 screws holding side panels on.
2 - Remove side panels
3 - Remove the 2 screws holding drive cage in
4 - Give a gently horizontal pull on drive cage towards front of unit.
5 - Gently lift drive cage out
6 - Install Hard drive(s), making sure they fit into their port on the backplane
7 - Reinstall Hard Drive Cage
8 - Screw in the 2 retaining screws
9 - Pick you RAID level
10 - Set jumpers to SET RAID level
11 - Put side panels back on and reinstall 4 retaining screws


The first step in the installation process is not too self-evident if you don't take a look at the instruction manual on the CD. You will first have to remove the four screws located underneath the feet of the Mediasonic enclosure and are partially hidden. Then you will have to remoev the side panels so you can use the included screwdriver to loosen the pair of screws holding down the hard drive cage.


When these screws are removed a gentle horizontal tug and then vertical pull removes the drive cage & backplane board from the main PCB. As easy and straightforward this is, it was found that fitting the hard drives into their data and power port on the backplane was easier said than done.

A far easier method to install the hard drives was: remove the drive cage from the enclosure, then remove the backplane from the drive cage, and gently attached the hard drives to the backplane. Then remount the backplane & hard drives in the drive cage.


For whatever reason following the manufacturers instructions we were only able to install one hard drive. With one hard drive installed there was not enough maneuvering room to get the second hard drive in its slot. This is problem may be limited to Seagate hard drives, as Western Digital hard drives had no installation issues.


Once the hard drives are installed and the drive cage is securely remounted the only thing left to do is set your RAID level or “mode” as Mediasonic calls it. This task is accomplished by setting two jumper pins over four of the six pins. Depending on which pins are shorted tells the array what mode you wish. Both enclosures come standard in “Single” mode.

Depending on which mode you choose this would be either the end of the installation or just the beginning. Unfortunately if you do follow the Mediasonic’s instructions step by step you will now have to remove the 2nd hard drive from the unit if you want RAID 1 mode. Both enclosures require you to have only one hard drive installed for first power on of RAID 1. You then have to wait until the hard drive 2 failure LED lights up, then and only then can you power down the enclosure, remove the drive cage and install the second hard drive. Then power up the enclosure for a second time and wait for it to build the array. Of course the enclosure is ready to be used immediately, just with reduced performance.


Overall, Mediasonic has taken a fairly easy, user friendly installation process and made it complicated and confusing. It is unclear if this is because the instructions were translated from another language and something was lost in translation or just that they let the engineer’s write the manual. Either way, the first time you try to setup a RAID 1, expect your installation time to be double that of any of the other modes.

As a side note, of the four possible modes, only RAID 1 takes a good amount of time to be completed. Single and both RAID 0 modes take less than 20 seconds for it to be ready and perform at its full potential. Just like the other modes, RAID 1 allows you to copy information to the enclosure as soon as your computer recognizes it, BUT depending on the size of your hard drives it will take many hours to complete. For example two 320GB hard drives took just over 5 hours for the array to be fully built. This extra time is to be expected with any RAID array and setting up the stripping does take time. The easiest way to think of it is to think of RAID 1 building as a hard format of two drives being done at the same time by the one controller.


Where these enclosures are geared towards Small Office / Home Office environments it was puzzling that no networking connection options were included. You can easily set this unit up as a shared drive so that other computers on your network can access it BUT the host computer must be left on to act as the intermediary and process all requests. In an $80 dollar enclosure this oversight is to be expected, however with the higher priced enclosure this oversight was conspicuous by its absence. If a manufacture is going to print SOHO on the sides of its enclosures it should do its research into what that particular market niche requires.

Before continuing I would also like to mention a potential long term negative we found with the SU2FWB model. Namely all three FireWire port connectors did display an alarming amount of flex while plugging in a cable. On close inspection it becomes apparent that none of the ports are reinforced and this flexing is the actual solder connections flexing. These solder points may break after extended use because of this flexing. It is puzzling why Mediasonic did not notice this issue in product testing, or did they notice it and did not see fit to reinforce the connectors? Could this be the reason two 1394b connectors are included?