Inside the T4H CR
After removing the fan assembly, you can see the backplane where the drives mate with the T4H CR. Components seem high quality throughout.
Before installing all the trays, we were able to take a peek at the controller down below which resembles a small computer with its own backup battery. This isn’t too far from the truth since the system does boot up and do its own POST internally upon start up.
The backplane looked like it could support SAS drives. Curious, I decided to toss one in there to see if the controller would recognize it. Not surprisingly, that was a negative, but I did try.
System Setup
In order to setup the Enhance Technology T4H CR for testing, we enlisted the help of Seagate Technology who graciously provided us four of their enterprise level ES.2 Barracuda 1 TB hard drives for our enjoyment. Other system specifications included:
- AMD Phenom 9900E 2.6GHz Quad Core CPU (Provided by AMD)
- Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe/WiFi-AP 790FX Motherboard (Provided by ASUS)
- CORSAIR XMS2 DHX 4GB DDR2-800 Memory Kit (Provided by CORSAIR)
- Sapphire ATOMIC HD3870 Video Card (Provided by Sapphire)
- Western Digital Velociraptor WD3000GLFS Hard Drive (Provided by Western Digital)
- HighSpeedPC Top Deck Tech Station (Provided by HighSpeedPC)
- ANTEC Quattro 1000 Watt Power Supply (Provided by ANTEC)
Initializing That RAID…
The whole setup process is done completely system independent. Following the quick step guide, we inserted each drive one by one. Once that was done, the LED panel asked if we wanted to set this bad boy up. Now this is where things get a little funny. You see, the enclosure doesn’t give you the option to go RAID 0 or 0+1 if you have four 1 TB drives. It automatically defaults to RAID 5. Since RAID initialization takes 7 hours, it was a royal pain to only find that out after fiddling with it for the third time. RAID 5 it is!
Also worth noting is that if you are using big bad 1 TB drives, only 2 TB total will be recognized when using USB 2.0 or Firewire 400/800. So if you want to see all of your storage, you need to be using the T4H CR with eSATA only.
Real-Time Price and Stock Check – Check For More Products Here