Review on Silverstone Rackmount Storage Interface RS431U by Christopher Cheek

I recently bought a new MacPro (dustbin) and one of its key design features is that any additional hard drives/SSDs need to be kept as external storage. I do tons of renders for VFX and motion graphics work, so I regularly fill up gigabytes of renders and switch HD clients back and forth. So I needed something simple, stable and reliable. I think I found it. My choice fell on the Icy Dock ICYCube MB561U3-4S and the Silverstone TS431U, both non-RAID JBOD boxes, which was an advantage for me since I have to change drives regularly; both had eSATA and USB 3.0 support, and both feature a durable aluminum chassis for passive heat conduction. I had an older Icy Dock Cube (eSATA and USB 2.0) a few years ago and it worked like a champ, but for some reason I kept coming back to Silverstone. Fall immediately so I could transfer about 7TB of data from my old machine. o new housing with new HD. I chose Silverstone. I still don't know exactly why, but I think the dual 80mm case fans and the easy slide in and eject design were what made the difference. The case impressed me; solid, solid metal, well weighted (doesn't tip over) with good rubber feet. Good hinged front door with magnetic closure for noise reduction and convection for suction. It's about 2 feet from me and it's quiet there; I hear a slight hum from it, but nothing distracts me. Installing drives is very easy and using USB 3.0 is extremely easy. I have a port multiplier dongle (USB3-eSATA) which I haven't used yet, but so far I'm happy with two Hitachi Deskstars 3TB and a Samsung Spinpoint 1TB in them. So far, so good. My glitches occurred when the MacPro went to sleep; Hard drives become disconnected, which can lead to corruption and data loss, especially when rendering overnight. I've read some and set the power saving settings to spin the HD (no sleep) but let the displays sleep. My next problem was with reboots/shutdowns. After installing the HD I would reboot; After backing up the operating system, the disks were never mounted. I had to power cycle the case for them to be recognized. Same with shutdown/reboot. If this continues, it will be a deal breaker. I contacted Silverstone Technical Support via email and received quick responses from a product engineer via a great and helpful CS rep. After a few more tests I realized I had created a problem; The cabinet was connected to the hub, not directly to the main computer. After I figured it out, it responds correctly on reboot and shutdown. PROS: Good all-metal JBOD case 2x 80mm case fans Lightweight drawer design Supports USB 3.0 and eSATA (host requires port multiplier for eSATA and JBOD) Good price Excellent tech support Contact us CONS: Avoid using hubs to connect to host computer. I definitely recommend this case. It's solid, sturdy and does what it's supposed to do. Once you connect directly to the host computer it should work fine. I hope this review helps someone!