Tech For Joe : The Force Awaken

After not doing anything with this blog for years, i am going to restart this blog and get serious.

I have got my own domain name and the site is here:

www.techforjoe.com

The site is still under construction as of today (16th Dec 2017) and i will start posting in that new site.

Thank you.

Review: Hornet Tek 4 Bay Hard disks enclosure

Hornet Tek Enterprise 4x (4 Bays Non-RAID Hard Disk Enclosure)

Item Description: 4 Bays non-RAID Hard Disk Enclosure, support USB 3.0 and e-SATA
Bought from : ALL IT Hypermarket (The Curve), Petaling Jaya, Selangor
Price: RM 359

I have been looking for an enclosure to house my 4 hard disks in an older Intel E5300 based PC which i have been using as a media server and download machine running 24/7. The reason i want to move the hard disks out is because i am sick of operating multiple PCs and have just upgraded my main rig to an Intel i3 machine, which is very energy efficient. (I'll leave that review for later!)

NAS enclosure don't come cheap and i don't need a NAS (my PC is already a very big NAS!) nor the RAID functions because i don't trust RAID on cheap enclosure...if your RAID array dies, say bye-bye to all your data...so what i need is a 4 bays enclosure which just support JBOD(Just a Bunch of Disks). All i want is to see my hard disks as it is from my new Intel i3 rig.

I was hunting for a Hotway Probox, unfortunately there's no stock and since this Hornet Tek is about RM50 cheaper, i said what the hell...can't be that bad, right? All these things are simple stuff like your water kettle. Pretty much anyone can make them right?? Well...sort of....

Packaging
Nothing fancy here, the box contains the following:
1. The HornetTek Enterprise 4X Hard Disks enclosure
2.  Power adapter and cable.
3.  1 USB 3.0 cable (remember USB 3.0 cable is not the same as USB 2.0 cable although they might look the same).
4.  E-Sata cable.
5.  A small plastic bag containing 9 screws (only 1 extra screw...cmon, give me at least 3 more! I tend to lose screws!).
6. User Manual

Yep, that's it. No CD drivers or anything because you don't need it if you run Windows 7/Vista. XP i am not so sure...but hey, i haven't have a machine with XP since Vista was launched, so no problem for me.

Assembly
Assembly was straight foward.
1. Just push the lock on the panel there to the left/right to lock/unlock.
2. Pull out the plastic bracket to hold the hard disk.
3. Slot your hard disk into the header.
4. Screw it.
5. Push the hard disk into the slot and lock it.

Note: DO REMEMBER NOT TO PUSH THE BARE HARD DISK INTO THE SLOTS WITHOUT THE PLASTIC BRACKET SCREWED TO THE HARD DISK! Otherwise, your hard disk will be stuck inside and you'll have a hard time getting it out as there's no header to act as a handle to pull it out.

Installation
I use the USB 3.0 ports on my new rig since i don't have e-SATA. Just plug it into the blue USB 3.0 ports on the PC and your job is done. Windows 7 will auto detect the drive and install drivers. You may go to the disk management to assign the proper drive letter as you see fit.

Just go to Start->Control Panel->System and Security->Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Disk Management

Right click on the drives and select 'Change drive letter and path' to re-assign the drive letter as you see fit.


The Photos

Build Quality
The build quality is acceptable but nothing Earth-shaking. There's a fan on top which sucks out the hot air, and in front, there are 5 lights. 4 blue lights and a green light for the power. Actually, i do like the lights design, looks really cool. But i wonder if they'll get sue for using the 'Enterprise' trademark and plagarised the trademark....they even put photos of the Enterprise from Star Trek in their website....LOL.

Important INFO: READ THIS!
Here , I would like to share some important info. Remember what i said about the water kettle analogy earliar? Well.....The first unit i bought, runs fine for 2 days, then it just stop working with no lights on the enclosure. The fan is still working, but the drives simply doesn't go online. This happens intermittently for a few days until it finally dies. Lucky for me, it was still within 7 days and i exchanged it for a brand new unit. With this unit there's some behaviour difference. The faulty unit i have, when i shutdown the PC, the drives are still online and i have to power down it manually. With the new unit, the enclosure will go offline and shutdown when i power off my PC (the green power lights will be still on, the hard disks blue lights will go off). This should be the correct operation logically.
So if you have a unit which doesn't shutdowns together with the PC. It's faulty! Go get an exchange!

Test Setup
1. Intel i3 2120 8GB RAM, ASUS P8ZZ7 V-LX motherboard with 2 internal SATA hard disks.
2. There are 4 WD Green hard disk drives in the HornetTek enclosure ( 3 x 2TB and 1 x 640GB).

This ASUS motherboard supports a technology called ASUS USB 3.0 Turbo which supposely enhance the speed of the file transfer via the USB 3.0. I intend to find out if it actually works! For the test, a 6.55GB movie file was copied between the various destination with the Turbo mode on and off.

The Results

1.  TurboMode Off, Copy from one HDD to another HDD within the HornetTek Casing.
     Average transfer speed hovers around more than 50MB/s when more than halfway through.

2.  TurboMode On, Copy from one HDD to another HDD within the HornetTek Enclosure.
     Average transfer speed hovers around  >  80MB/s when more than halfway through!!!

3. TurboMode Off, Copy from one HDD(in the HornetTek Enclosure) to one of the internal SATAHDD.
     Average transfer speed hovers around > 80MB/s when more than halfway through!!!

4. TurboMode On, Copy from one HDD(in the HornetTek Enclosure) to one of the internal SATAHDD.
     Average transfer speed hovers around > 70MB/s when more than halfway through!!! This result is strange as it is lower than when the Turbo is Off. I've tested it a few times, it's no fluke. The results remains consistently lower when the TurboMode is On!

Power Consumption
Power consumption of the enclosure with 4 hard disks is about 19W when idle and push to 25W when 2 drives are active. This is measured at the power socket using a power meter (similar to Kill O Watt). I would say the power consumption should from 19W idle to 30W max when on load

Summary And Conclusion
Basically, i am quiet happy with it...as long as it doesn't breaks down like the first unit. In terms of usability, it does exactly what i want. As for the performance, it is pretty good especially when Turbomode is turned on and files are copied between the disk in the Hornet Tek enclosure. An improvement of 20MB/s - 30MB/s is achievable! Impressive indeed!

However, the results is strange when copying from the HornetTek enclosure to the internal SATA drives where a lower transfer rates was recorded (about 10MB/s degration) when the Turbo mode is turned on and it performs better when the Turbomode is turned off.

If any one has done testing on this, please feel free to share some results!

What's this Blog About

This blogs is to present information based on my passion on tech, gadgets, hardware and software. Before you say 'There's 10,792,232,124,612,329 websites out there talking about the same thing, what makes this slightly different will be i'll be attempting to actually put it to USE in real world application and present all the information to solve the problems encountered. More importantly, instead of reviewing just a single gadget or software, i'll try to integrate it with multiple hardware/software to see how the thing actually runs in the real world.

I'm sure tech heads like me has bought a gadget home, brought it home, excited and...BANG...some things just doesn't works due to one million possible configurations, network, software, settings, etc (or your latest gadget toy is just a plain no good junk and doesn't work). So i would like to share with all of you my experiences and hopefully, some of you will bang your head against the wall a little less with some info which you can use here!

My reviews won't be a one shot thingy as I'll continue to present solution or other discovery to you regarding the hardware/software in question.

And I would appreciate all feedbacks on my reviews so that i may update it and all credits will be properly given to contributors!

Thank you and Enjoy!