It’s been a few weeks since I talked about storage solutions.  I’m getting closer to purchasing a solution for my home/office, which will undoubtedly be a raid hanging off of eSata.  I’ve used a few different eSata towers and will eventually talk about each of these solutions.  Today I’m going to cover one of the better ones – the G-SPEED eS from G-Technology.
The G-SPEED eS is a mini-tower with 4 removable drive modules. With current drives it provides an unformatted capacity of 4 TB.  It attaches to a Mac or PC via one eSata cable. The typical package comes with an PCIe eSata raid controller, which is the host adaptor and handles the raid management.  This particular raid card has 4 eSata ports, meaning that it can handle 4 G-SPEED’s.  It is therefore possible to raid 16 TB drives together providing a reported 600 MB/sec.  (Although I have not invested the 6 grand to verify this speed – and you know how much I hate just repeating advertised bandwidth – so YMMV).
Once it’s set up as a RAID 5, your local system sees it as one volume and a single drive failure should not cause data loss. The bad drive module can be replaced and the RAID will rebuild itself.  I’ve not dissected this particular model, but generally a module is just a tray that the raw eSata drive screws onto, which makes for easy replacement and upgrade.
Now, let’s talk about the storage solution in practice. Â In my setup, I’ve raided the 4 x 1TB drives into a Raid 5. This means that 1/4th of the drive space is lost for parity (data loss protection). The formatted capacity is down to 2.73 TB. I do wish that G-Technology had made this tower 5 high instead of only 4 high. Then the RAID 5 would only lose 1/5th of the space for the raid.
Read/Write performance is impressive with a very consistent Write: 163.7 MB/s, Read: 174.9 MB/s.  A read speed that rivals a well equipped Xsan.
This storage solution also has some downsides. First is the setup time. Unlike a G-Raid drive that come ready to roll, the G-SPEED eS can be used in any number of configurations and therefore arrives unconfigured configureless raw. Â For me, the RAID 5 setup process took 18 hours – so DONT expect to take the tower out of the box and use it the same day. Â During this process the RAID is not usable and does not show up on your desktop. Â You just have to wait.
As seen on G-Tech’s website, setup is done via a control panel which is loaded using Safari. Â This confused me at first. Â Basically what’s happening here is that the RAID configuration happens on the PCIe controller card. Â It formats the drives, sets up the RAID and then presents it to the computer as one mountable volume. Â If a drive failure were to happen, you would log into this control panel to rebuild the raid. I don’t know what the process looks like or how long it takes because I’ve never had to do it. I welcome someone to talk about it in the comments.
Another problem is that the PCIe controller card has a very loud alarm that goes off whenever it thinks there is a problem. One thing that set it off was detaching a stand-alone eSata device – the Vantex NexStar.  The first time this happened I thought it was the UPS alarming. Eventually I figured out that it was coming from inside the computer. Once it starts the only way to make it stop is to reboot the computer. There is a setting inside the control panel to turn off the alarm – which I recommend.
The final consideration is that the RAID controller is on the PCIe card. For my taste an overall better solution is to have the raid controller inside the mini-tower. The advantage of having it inside the computer is that you can raid multiple towers together creating a mega-RAID. However, I prefer having it inside the tower to remove the RAID management process from the inside of the computer and have the solution as more of a stand alone device.
Overall the G-SPEED eS is a lot of bandwidth bang for your buck. A 4TB package is about $1600 which includes the PCIe controller card.