Addonics Disk Array 5SA RAID Cage Review

Addonics Disk Array 5SA
AE5RCS35NSA (Black) or AE5RCS35NSAW (White)

The Addonics 5SA Disk Array is a 5-bay SATA/SATA-II drive mounting system. It is used for easy adding or removing drives from your RAID array.

This unit comes in 3 flavors containing 5, 4 or 3 drives. Each drive adds slightly to the MSRP:

AE5RCS35NSA - Disk Array 5SA (5 Drives)
$129

AE4RCS35NSA - Disk Array 4SA (4 Drives)
$109.95

AE3RCS35NSA - Disk Array 3SA (3 Drives)
$89.95

What's Included?

Inside the box you'll find the cage unit, 5 drive trays, 5 sata cables, a bag of screws and a manual. There are 20 flat-top screws for mounting drives into trays and 4 for mounting the cage. The manual is great. It is detailed and leaves nothing to the imagination.

The RAID Array unit has a very solid aluminum frame with a plastic cover on the front and back. Overall construction quality is fantastic.

The Front of the Unit

The front of the unit has 7 LED incidator lights, and 6 switches.
Lights
5 lights are for HD power (Green) and activity (Amber)
1 light is for temperature (Solid Green for good, Blinking Red for bad)
1 light is for the fan health (Solid Green for good, Solid Red for bad)
Switches
5 switches are for hard drive power (these are small toggle switches that must be operated with a pen or small tipped object)
1 reset switch to turn off the temperature alarm

The front of the enclosure:

The Back of the Unit

The back of the has many connectors.

On the right side there are 5 sata connectors.
On the left side there are 2 sets of power connectors. You can only use EITHER the 15-pin SATA or the 4-pin "IDE style" Molex connectors, not BOTH. There is a vibrant yellow sticker detailing this warning.

There is a small switch on the lower left that toggles the fan speed to a high (3200 RPM) or low (2800 RPM) speed.

Near the top you can see the round buzzer and next to it a bunch of jumpers and headers.

Immediately to the right of the circular buzzer is the temperature setting jumper. The alarm can be switched to trigger at 55, 60 or 65 degrees C.

Next to the temp setting is a header that you can use to externally detect fan failure, temperature, HDD power, HDD activity, and trigger the temp alarm reset. This seems like a handy little extra!

The back of the enclosure:

A silver sticker on the side of the cage details the power and reset buttons:

Inside the unit there is a firey red backplane. Here you can see the five SATA data-and-power combo connections:

The drive trays are a minimalist design. Each tray consists of an aluminum frame, and a latching arm assembly that is used to lock the tray into the cage.

On each tray there is a locking mechanism that turns and prevents the latching arm from coming out. This can be used to keep individual drives locked into the cage.

Mounting a drive in a tray goes as follows:

1) Place your drive on a flat surface bottom side up
2) Set the drive tray on top of the drive
3) using the supplied flat-top screws, screw the drive into the tray

Operation is very simple. Simply push the button on the left of the tray and the arm will swing out, and pull the arm to eject the drive tray completely.

Mounting the array is dead simple. In my case, I needed to attach drive rails to the side and slide the unit into the computer's chassis. When the unit is secured to the chassis, simply connect either the SATA or Molex power along with the SATA data connections.

The unit takes up 3, 5.25 drive bays.

Inside the chassis:

Conclusion

Overall the Addonics 5 Disk Raid Array is a solid product. The construction is good, and there are many features. This is a great SOHO or enthusiast product for low count RAID arrays. I would recommend it to anyone!

Revision History:
2009-3-23 Initial Publication

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