Cavalry Personal Hard Drive Array - CADA002SA4 - Never Lose Data Again!!
Cavalry 2TB (4x500GB) eSATA Disk Array RAID Kit w/RAID Controller

Its very slow for sataII (havn't bothered investigating why, probably the crappy esata card), but is cheap and works great at raid5. Took a while to format, docs said it should have come formatted, oh well. We'll see how good it is after a drive fails, will it handle it? Who knows? (keep in mind its when, not if. Drives always fail at some point)
 
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I have had a RAID array for my work for the last eight years. I run a lot of computer simulations which I must have reliable access to while sharing the input and results with my company. I have always used a RAID 0+1 configuration. I bought this array to replace my old PATA array which is housed internally on my old (and failing) computer. I specifically wanted an external box to minimize power requirements and heating issues. I wanted four disks, so I could have the performance benefits of striping with the peace of mind of mirrored data. After a lot of research, I found that it was nearly impossible to find an external RAID enclosure with this much disk space at a better price. I also found that customers were not exactly raving about features or support; however, everyone ultimately seemed satisfied. I like the look of the box. It is simple and sleek. It is very unobtrusive on my desktop. I also find that it is nearly silent. It is easily drowned out by simple things like the A/C. I found setup to be slightly confusing but not awful. I installed the controller card before I read the driver installation instructions. Apparently, they ship multiple cards. You need to identify them visually to make certain that you install the correct driver. The instructions also failed to indicate that you need to configure the array(s) via the GUI. I am used to configuring them through the controller card BIOS. The controller card does have a BIOS that looks like you can configure everything; however, nothing works via the BIOS. I was very upset at first thinking that I had a bad device. Fortunately, I decided to try to reboot and try via the GUI. I found that the GUI was fairly intuitive to use, and I had no further trouble with the setup after this. I have not had an opportunity to do specific performance benchmarking; however, my impression so far is that the performance is average. It does not seem to be any faster than my internal SATA drives (nor any slower). My old PATA array seems to be a bit faster. I do not know if this is simply a price that has to be paid in order to have an external array. If so, I would still choose the external array. I am also an amateur photographer with many gigs of pictures. I currently use two external USB drives to house and backup my images. Assuming that I do not hit a failure in the coming months, I will definitely buy one (maybe two) of these for my home PC as well. Overall, I believe the instructions and driver disks should be reworked. They give the feel of a very small and haphazard operation. However, the device and GUI go a long way to repairing that damage.
 
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This item is a good value, and includes everything you need, however be prepared to do a little setup before you can use it. Mine included a faulty driver cd, and the drivers were not easy to find. I had to go to the silicon website to get the drivers for the chipset and bios version included. There are many different bios versions, so make sure you have the right one before attempting to install it. Once I got it working, there were no problems. Be aware that you pay less because you will not get much from the Cavalry website if you have problems.
 
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I did a lot of research on getting a quality RAID 5 HD. After e-mailing w/ support at Cavalry, I was convinced that this was a good machine for me to get. After purchasing the HD, I quickly found out that it does not work as a RAID 5 on my MacBook Pro. It works great as a JBOD or a RAID 1 ... but not a RAID 5. Right now it is a great big paper weight! Tech support does not know the difference between a MacBook Pro and a Mac Pro.
 
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This is a great price for this, the lowest I could find. And at $649.99 it's even about $200 cheaper than I paid for it in June, and I still think THAT was a good price. BUT... I couldn't get the RAID 5 to work on the MacOS. First they thought it was the card. Then the software. And I got stuck in the no-man's land between Cavalry and the card manufacturer, with each company's rep telling me it was the other guy's problem. Went through countless driver installs and etc. Finally, FINALLY, after 3 weeks of this the card manufacturer looked at something online, checked some specs, and then did a mea culpa and said, "Oops! Sorry. You know what? RAID 5 isn't supported on the MacOS." Decided to keep it anyway because I needed the storage space. But I really wanted that RAID 5 redundancy and one big, virtual megadrive. Oh well.
 
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