 Fast drive and great tech support |
| Review Date: February 20, 2010 |
| Reviewer: John Cowgill, N. California |
This 2Tb array is a great deal. It worked as a Raid 1 drive right out of the box and was reconfigured to Raid 0 using the supplied utilies in about 10 minutes. The trick is you have to READ THE DIRECTIONS. You can't skim over them or just look at the pictures.
After I was finished installing the unit I had a question about tranfer speed and was thrilled to find that when I called Cavalry that not only did they put me through to a real tech, he was glad to talk to me and knew what he was doing. Other companies just don't do that anymore.
All in all, one of the better experiences I've had with a tech product. |
Great Product, Poor Documentation
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| Review Date: April 7, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Norm W. Donaldson, So Cal |
| The documentation for this procuct is incomplete and required direct contact with the maunufacturer. That being said, once up & running it is an excellent value. |
Fast shipping
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| Review Date: September 12, 2009 |
| Reviewer: kkfredde, |
| It was difficult to install, directions have alot to be desired. Drive is shipped with the drives unplugged from the socket, this requires the disassembly of the unit. Drive is also shipped raid "1," wanted raid "0." After 1 day of toying with the drive I got it to work. If you are uncomfortable with taking apart the unit and building a Raid array you might want to opt for a single drive thats plug and play. So far no problems with the drive. I do like the esata option, much faster read/write times compared to USB. I build high-end gaming machines, so I am used to building multi-array systems. |
Works as intended.
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| Review Date: July 18, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Ernesto Sabogal Gomez, Bogotá, Colombia |
I was kind of worry after buying this disk because although I had read some reviews it wasn't after I bought it that the bad reviews appeared.
Documentation
No paper documentation, only a CD but really it is very bad.
Installation
Some reviews talk about hours of doing this correctly. When it arrived: shutdown computer, plug in power to the disk, plug esata cable to disk - computer, turn on disk, turn on computer, during POST the message of new drive recognized, into windows, into disk manager, format just in case, done. Five minutes. I am using Windows 7 RC x64.
This disk arrived RAID 1 as I needed so no problem or messing around changing to RAID 0 or RAID 0+1.
Performance
I used Everest to benchmark the disk.
Linear Read Middle: 74MB/s
Buffered Read: 101.8MB/s
Average read access: 12.98ms
Just for comparing, the results with my internal WD Velociraptor 300GB:
Linear read middle: 103.1MB/s
Buffered read: 245.8MB/s
Average read access: 6.87ms
Real performance:
I transfer a folder with +4400 files, 13.3GB from internal drive to this unit in 4:32, gives a rough 48.9MB/s
A second transfer with +28000 files, 92.9GB in 25:15, 61.3MB/s.
Not bad, in the "normal" range. |
Works well...setup is challenging
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| Review Date: February 24, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Kaymee Photography, NorCal |
I purchased this model because of the price and options, specifically being able to plug it in to an eSATA port. After getting everything setup (more below), the drive has worked wonderfully. With the included WD drives, the drive verify and storage is very nice. It works great as a backup system.
Now the problems. Setup was a bear! Given the fact that documentation is non-existent out of the box, I had to "rebuild" the drives twice, at over 12 hours EACH! The drive is supposed to be PnP, and maybe it is, but there were no clear instructions on setting it up. I plugged it in and it didn't work. I played with my eSATA connection and couldn't get it to work. I plugged it in to a USB and it worked fine so no drive issue. I then plugged in the included eSATA port and then couldn't figure out how to "format" the drives, so the 2nd rebuilding began. Finally, I found instructions online and after skipping 3-4 pages, found where to setup the software to make it work.
Without that setup fiasco, this product would be rated higher. It has worked fine for me since. |
Don't bother.
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| Review Date: August 31, 2009 |
| Reviewer: T. Neal, Lexington, VA United States |
| Setup is a little painful because they provided incorrect/insufficient documentation for the product (even on their website). Luckily I was able to contact customer service and she walked me through the setup (this included dis-assembling the drive array). Long story short, I have a nice 2TB RAID config, but can only get it working correctly with USB. |
So you think your data is protected now? Well, it is BUT...
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| Review Date: March 31, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Gene, Edison, NJ |
I bought this drive because of a simple reason - RAID1 - I wanted to make sure my data is protected, so I am using just 1TB of space, the second drive is used for mirroring. Today the enclosure went bad (lasted just 6 months) - blinking green light (according to the Cavalry manual indicating no connectivity to the host computer), and OS stopped recognizing the drive. I tried USB instead of eSATA, and also tried USB on another computer - negative, OS does not see the drive, enclosure is blinking green.
The unit is still on warranty, but check the choices I have:
(1) send the unit back to manufacturer for warranty repair. Then my data is LOST, since the manufacturer will either send me a replacement or will fix this original unit and erase all data in the process.
(2) send this unit to a third party company to get the data off the unit (and pay like $500 for the service), then ship the unit to Cavalry for repair along with a paper from the third party company explaining that the unit was opened for data recovery, so Cavalry would not void the warranty
(3) open the unit myself and copy the data from it (remember, the drives are OK, it is the enclosure itself that went bad) but then Cavalry voids the warranty since I should not open the unit.
Laughable situation.. but the data is safe ;-)
A side note - the unit is noisy too. |
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