Antec MX-1 eSATA & USB 2.0 HDD enclosure

[Darksaber]

The Antec MX-1 is part of the new Veris brand and features a very unique design. You get eSATA and USB 2.0 connectiviy inside a solid plastic & aluminum enclosure. It is a bit larger than most enclosures, but features a very effective cooling design to keep the temperature of the installed SATA drive down to a minimum.

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[pt]

isn't 1.5 meters enough?, that's almost as big as me!

 

[skylinegtr]

Great product to build a RAID

I have read a lot of reviews of the Antex Mx1 and I have been surprised that not a single one pointed out one of it's biggest strengths.

That is that you can use this to build an external RAID system.

I do not think that a lot of people know that one can NOT build a RAID or use the Volume striping features in VISTA with External Media such as External USB or Firewire disks.

You CAN with External Sata disks and that is because to the OS, it looks just like an internal Sata disk.


I have a Cable Card PC (Like a TIVO only PC/Vista based) and needed a large capacity RAID to hold the recordings. So, I set out to figure out how to put togteher a 1.5 TB RAID.

I had to go external because my PC has room to maybe put 1 extra disk in it but certainly not 3. That meant that I could not simply plug in 3 500 Gbyte External USB disks because then I would not have have a single 1.5 TB disk
The motherboard has 8 Sata connections and 5 of them are there to support RAID


I got an amazing deal on 3 500 Gbyte Seagate 3.0 Gbps Sata disks. Then I hunted around and found a bunch of reviews on this Antec MX1. All extremely favorable.
Luck has been on my side these days since 2 weeks ago, CC had them on sale for $39.00 each so I bought 4 of them.


So, I removed the 3 Esata connectors from the PCI slot covers and poked them through my one open PCI slot (later I make Drill the case to mount these so as to make it look more professional).
I then installed eachh of the 3 disks in each enclosure, plugged it all in and rebooted my machine.

During the boot I went into the Bios section where you can configure Intel's onboard RAID controller and configured the 3 disks as RAID 0 using the recommended stripe size of 128 (as I recall).

System booted into Vista and I have a disk showing which has a capacity of 1.5 TB (It actually showed something less but I am cheating via my use of 1024 as the definition of 1K as it should be)

The ATTO benchmarks are hysterical to see in action
When you are striping across 3 (most people use 2 disks in the RAID 0 configs) disks, I am getting HUGE transfer rates both in the small and the large size transfers in ATTO.


I wrote this post to remind folks that this enclosure is the way to go if you need an external RAID because it is a SATA enclosure


Since this is my first post here, I can assure you that I do NOT work for Antec and trying to push this item.
I only wrote this post because NO review I read ever mentioned the fact that you can not use External Firewire or USB disks as striped disks or RAID's.

Joe

 

[skylinegtr]

and thanks to the fan, you could leave the enclosure on all night long without loosing any sleep due to noise or worry of an overheating drive.

This will make it post #2

Your point about leaving this disc on 24/7 is very important for the application that I am using these enclosures for.

I have 3 with 500 Gbyte Sata drives in each to use as my Recording RAID 0 Disk for my dual ATI Cable Card Tuner VIsta Cable Card PC (like a TIVO).

I have had this Cable card PC since September and it is not very reliable in coming out of sleep mode to do scheduled recordings so I simply leave this on 24/7 and with minimal power management settings.

Since the Cable card PC has a pause/playback buffer like the TIVO does, it is always recording whatever channel the tuner is tuned to onto the RAID so heat is a VERY important issue



Thanks for a very thourogh and detailed review. I read a lot of reviews on this enclosure researching Esata enclosures but YOUR review was the one which finally made up my mind.