HD For Indies

This is a "Mike gets hands on" review.

I recently received a review unit of the Trans International (transintl.com) miniG 4 drive SATA drive enclosure.

First off, the appearance - it looks like a little G5, as if you left your G5 in the tumble dryer too long and shrank it. It matches the industrial design of the G5 quite well. It is aluminum, it has drilled holes in the front and back just like the G5, and handles just like the G5 at top/bottom/front/back. I like the look, although I've heard some say its a bit cloying and overly cutesy. Whatever - a personal decision, but I like it and think it'd look fine and professional sitting on the desk next to the G5. Unless you have a super high end client, they'd probably think it was cool too sitting next to a G5.

The design is functional - all those drilled holes serve the same purpose here as they do on a G5, with air flowing in the front and out the back for excellent cooling.

A big advantage in my book is the size - this thing is TINY, especially as compared to the much, much larger MacGurus Burly drives that I have sitting around, that are probably 3 or 4 times bigger in volume. The enclosure is a hair wider than the drives mounted in it, and just tall enough to have them one over the other with room for airflow between. There is room in the back for the cabling and some fans to draw air out of the unit. To me, this is ideal - why have the enclosure take up any more desk real estate than it has to? I'm not trying to impress anybody with size.

One reason that the unit is so small, however, is the enormous external power brick that it requires - unlike some other enclosures with built in power supplies, this one is external and HUGE. It's about the volume of a good sized paperback book, and you can see it in comparison to the enclosure and a G5 in the lame-o picture I've got at the beginning of this article, taken on my home studio's floor. One complaint that I have is that the cord from the power brick to the unit is a fixed cable, and just barely long enough to go from the back of the unit on a desk to the floor (which is where you'd want to hide this monster of a brick). They should either make that cable a couple of feet longer or include an extender cable in the box when you buy it. Otherwise, if you have the enclosure on your desk, and there's any wire routing you've got to do other than a direct shot to the floor, it leaves the brick hanging in space, or pulling the enclosure towards the back of your desk. Not good. If you're putting it on the floor, you can probably hide it away behind the G5 or something to keep it out of site. Aesthetically, it interferes with the tiny coolness of the enclosure.

There are five lights on the front, one to indicate power and then one for each of the drives to indicate drive status. As with all SATA enclosures of this nature, there is one cable per drive, so you'd need 4 available ports on a SATA card to attach to this enclosure. When it comes to tidy/professional looks, a little cable wrangling is in order (as it would be with any 4 cable enclosure). My current favorite is the Sonnet lineup, they have a 4+4 (4 internal/4 external) and 8 port Tempo-X eSATA cards. Driverless and trouble free. The Firmtek/Seritek 4 port external cards are also good, but more finicky about what drives they work with (no SSC enabled drives please!). Also as with other enclosures of this nature, you can configure the drives any way your software will support - 4 individual drives, a 4 drive RAID 0, 2 RAID 1s, whatever you want - mix and match as you please.

Their sample unit had four 250 GB drives in it and performed as I'd expect any enclosure with four similar drives - around 250 MB/sec when empty. You can buy the enclosure empty for $499 from their website, or pre-built with drives in capacities from 1.2 to 2.0 TB of capacity at higher prices. This compares favorably with other products of similar looks and quality from other Mac centric vendors. The $600 4 bay hot swap that ProMax, Sonnet, and others sell is what pops to mind.

In use, the unit was reasonably quiet, but glancing in the case, I see they have fairly small fans. I'd like to see a quieter unit by using larger, lower velocity fans (which is how the G5 stays as quiet as it does yet still pushes so much air through to keep it cool). But I would say that it would certainly be "edit room acceptable" if you also had a G5 out in the open in the same room as well.

In real world performance, I can say this about it - I recently had a client that needed to get us a copy of their Avid based project to color correct but didn't have budget to rent a Digibeta deck to master to, nor for us to charge accordingly to capture from one. So I skipped the Digibeta and just went directly from her Adrenaline's SDI output directly into the SDI input of a G5 of mine (BlackMagic card). I needed storage to capture the footage (about 150 GB), so I toted the miniG with me over there. For one, the tiny size and weight made it a pleasure to tote around as compared to my larger MacGurus Burly Boxes or my equally small but too-many-pieces-to-conveniently-transport Firmtek Seritek 2 bay hotswap enclosures. I had the miniG set up as a 4 drive RAID 0 and it worked as I'd expect - perfectly! Not a dropped frame in capturing an hour and thirty minutes of uncompressed 10 bit NTSC video. After that I took it home and set it up again and did various edity and exporty things with it and it for a couple of days and it worked fine. One time it didn't mount at startup when I was hooking it back up, but that was most likely due to a loose SATA cable in a plug socket - a common concern with these one-cable-per-drive SATA connection setups common to most SATA enclosures. But nothing I'd single this unit out for above any other enclosure.

As for HD performance, I'd expect it to be the same as any other 4 bay enclosure with the same drives in it - good enough for all 4:2:2 HD work if carefully partitioned and using only the fastest part of the array, good enough for all compressed HD work, good enough for 720p24 work uncompressed, etc. See other blog postings about detailed throughput requirements for HD work. (Try the FAQ, link at top right of page).

But there's no reason why you couldn't get two of these and connect them via a Sonnet Tempo-X 8 port eSATA card to get all the throughput you'd need for any kind of HD work you'd be likely to encounter, and that would make for a great looking, well cooled setup to hold up to 4TB of HD video - just enough to offline and online an HD feature if you're careful and plan correctly.

When it comes to SATA enclosures, drive performance is pretty much 98% dependent on the drives used and how they connect to the SATA card. This unit uses one cable per drive (standard eSATA implementation) and performance is right up there where I'd expect it to be, and that's a good thing. Thus the only things the enclosure does that I care about are:

-provide good clean power (God I'd hope so with that huge brick)
-look good (check)
-provide more than adequate ventilation/cooling (check and super check, excellent breathing room in there)
-be quiet in studio (it is 80-90% of what I'd want)
-be trouble free in operation (check)
-not cost an arm and a leg (wellllll....sorta)

The unit did occassionally exhibit a slight rattling noise, and upon examination I think it is because the sides of the unit are buzzing/rattling against the front (the air holed drilled part). They either need to put a small wedge of absorbent material in there, or screw it down, or something. It didn't always make the noise, but annoying when it did. This is easily user fixable but shimming some folded paper in there or something like that. But you shouldn't have to.

Also in the quibbly category, these are tall thin units (and small, and small is good in my book), but they wouldn't stack vertically in a way that I'd feel safe with (too much height, not enough width for stability). I'd love it if they shipped the unit with LRF support (little rubber feet) so that you could stack them on their sides. But if you did that, the handles would look a bit dorky. Sigh - such is life and the complications therein. You can always buy clear silicone LRF at Fry's or Radio Shack or whatnot if you wanted to do that, and if space were at a premium on my desk and I had more than two of these enclosures, that's what I'd do. Otherwise they'd scratch if set on their sides.

Overall, it is a nice enclosure. Good looking, well cooled, well powered. A bit pricey compared to some of the simpler options out there, but not unreasonable when surveying the other options on the market of similar quality.

The only changes I'd like to see would be a longer cord from the power brick to the unit (it is fixed and unreplaceable), elimination of the occassional rattle, larger/quieter internal fans, and a lower price (I'd love to see $100 to $150 less but that may not be realistic with this aluminum enclosure). All of these things are assembly line fixes and not huge changes, so perhaps some of these might be incorporated at a later date.

Overall: a solid B. Great looks, good technical performance (power, connecting, drive speed and cooling), kinda highish cost, slight noise issues (minor) and some quibbly engineering details (fan & occassional vibration noise, huge brick on short cord) are all that bring it down. If those issues were addressed, I'd give it an A. If they did that and dropped the price to $350, A+, and it would be my top pick for a fixed SATA enclosure.

-mike