Recommended, with reservations.

I wrote of my intention to move all my movies from half a dozen external enclosures to one in yesterday’s piece, opting for the Mediasonic HF2-SU3S2 (Amazon – $130). What follows is as relevant to storing photo files as it is to video. Having taken delivery and transferred my movies to 3Tb drives in the enclosure, here are some observations.

• Very well made and well packed for transit.
• Near useless ‘Chinglish’ instructions.
• Front flap opens easily and door can be removed.
• More flashing LEDs than you can shake a stick at.
• Auto power-up must be switched off (two presses on top right front panel ‘Sync’ button) or the case shuts down with OS 10.7.4 Lion. This is purportedly a function which works with Windows, something I will never explore.
• Once the front door is removed a two catchpress retaining plate is removed to gain drive access
• Drives slide in and need a bit of wiggling to locate the power and SATA connectors. No big deal but side rails would have made this easier.
• Attachable drive handles are provided to make it easier to remove drives; these attach with screws and a screwdriver is provided. I have found you do not have to use these. If you do not use them, drive installation needs no tools.
• The box is compact, some 9″ deep x 6″ tall x 5″ wide.
• The three position fan switch has Auto, Low and High settings. The latter roars, the Auto, which is thermostatically controlled, remains very quiet in practice. Inaudible at 6 feet.
• The power cable socket is at the side which makes it impossible to abut these enclosures next to one another if you have more than one. Inept design.
• As shipped it’s set to USB; to switch to eSATA a front panel button must be held for 4 seconds. For eSATA connectivity, see the Update at the end of this piece (Hackintosh only; eSata is not available on Macs).
• When copying files to a drive the bar aligned with the front power switch dances crazily with an LED show. Bizarre, but irrelevant in practice, unless it’s in line of sight.
• Rubber feet provide noise and vibration isolation.

To add USB3 capability to my HackMini I installed a two port Western Digital USB3 card in one of the short slots.

The Mini uses a modest Core i3 Sandy Bridge CPU and an equally modest Gigabyte H67M-D2-B3 motherboard. That’s all that is needed for movie playback, and the motherboard used has no USB3 sockets, hence the add-on card.

I then installed the NEC/Renesas driver using TonyMac’s Multibeast application and verified that my USB3 card reader was recognized as a USB3 device when connected with a USB3 cable. All was well.

However, neither my HP100 Hackintosh, the 2012 MacBook Air or the HackMini would recognize the enclosure when connected with a USB3 cable. Research disclosed that the maker is aware of this and claims to be working on it but as the issue has persisted since at least the introduction of Lion a year ago, don’t hold your breath. So if you are doing processing of pictures or video and need the high speed connection offered by USB3, this enclosure is not for you – yet. (See the Update at the end of this piece where Hackintosh users can activate the faster eSATA connection).

Using a USB2 cable there were no issues. After disabling the auto-power feature the enclosure and drives were immediately recognized and everything was ready to go. I popped successive 1Tb drives into the enclosure copying the movies from these to the 3Tb drives inside. The enclosure can be used with software RAID (included in OS X’s Disk Utility) but for my purposes the regular setting as JBOD (Just a Bunch Of separate Drives) is fine.

When I tried to format my first 3Tb drive using a USB2 cradle attached to HP100 Disk Utility could only format 801Gb of space. However, once the drive was inserted in the enclosure, the full 3Tb was recognized and formatted, suggesting that the enclosure drive controller is a lot more current than the ancient one in my drive cradle.

Recommended, with the reservations stated above.

Note also that as hard disk drive manufacturers have consolidated, quality control appears to have fallen judging from buyers comments at Newegg and Amazon. Accordingly, to spread the risk I bought two Seagate and two Western Digital Drives. We will see, though my exerience with these machines is similar to that for all machines – they fail when very young and very old. If you can get through the first few months, chances are pretty good that years of troublefree service will follow.

Updating links in a DVDpedia catalog:

Here’s the code provided by Conor at DVDpedia for v5 of the Bruji app; he shows links to six old drives (‘MyOldMovieDriveTB1-1 through 6’) to two new drives (‘MyNewMovieDriveTB3-1 through 2’). Simply cut and paste this into Terminal replacing the names with the names of your drive(s). I have tested this and it works perfectly. Thank you, Conor!

/usr/bin/sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/DVDpedia/Database.dvdpd

update ZLINK Set ZURL = replace(ZURL, ‘file:///Volumes/MyOldMovieDriveTB1-1’, ‘file:///Volumes/MyNewMovieDriveTB3-1’);
update ZLINK Set ZURL = replace(ZURL, ‘file:///Volumes/MyOldMovieDriveTB1-2’, ‘file:///Volumes/MyNewMovieDriveTB3-1’);
update ZLINK Set ZURL = replace(ZURL, ‘file:///Volumes/MyOldMovieDriveTB1-3’, ‘file:///Volumes/MyNewMovieDriveTB3-1’);

update ZLINK Set ZURL = replace(ZURL, ‘file:///Volumes/MyOldMovieDriveTB1-4’, ‘file:///Volumes/MyNewMovieDriveTB3-2’);
update ZLINK Set ZURL = replace(ZURL, ‘file:///Volumes/MyOldMovieDriveTB1-5’, ‘file:///Volumes/MyNewMovieDriveTB3-2’);
update ZLINK Set ZURL = replace(ZURL, ‘file:///Volumes/MyOldMovieDriveTB1-6’, ‘file:///Volumes/MyNewMovieDriveTB3-2’);

.exit

This updates yesterday’s link to the Bruji chat board where the link shown to sqlite3 is now outdated.

Update – use with eSATA:

Macs do not support eSATA connections but Hackintoshes can be readily adapted. If your motherboard comes with eSATA all you need do is install this driver from Tonymac:

Multibeast eSATA driver.

Once installed and rebooted, System Profiler will show the eSATA ports thus:

eSATA ports on the Hackintosh.

My system shows two ports as there’s one on the card and one on the front of the Antec case I use, connected to a header on the motherboard. However, the Z68X motherboard I use does not support port multiplication, so only the first of the four drives in the enclosure is reported in Finder when using eSATA. Read on for the fix.

If your motherboard does not have eSATA, you can add an inexpensive PCIe card which must have ‘port multiplication’. Absent this feature only the first of your drives will mount. This $23 card is known to work.

You will also need an eSATA cable. Happily the enclosure comes with both USB3.0 and eSATA cables, though neither is very long.

I switched the enclosure to eSATA by holding the top right button (‘Interface’) down for 4 seconds, then connected the enclosure to my Hackintosh.

System Profiler now reports the drive:

The Mediasonic connected using eSATA.

I then ran Xbench tests, comparing USB2 with eSATA.

First USB2:

Using USB2 with the SATA3 3TB Seagate drive.

Then eSATA:

Using eSATA.

So the overall speed increase is 55%. Not stellar but handy when copying large files. Further, the larger the data blocks the greater is the gain, with 256k blocks averaging 3-4x as fast. That’s worthwhile.

Update 9/20/2012 – use with MacBook Air 2012 and USB3:

I dropped Mediasonic an email explaining that the enclosure would not be recognized by the MBA when connected with a USB3 cable. I received a courteous reply stating that they would send me an updated circuit board, and asking I return the original. They followed up with instructions for replacement (these were almost right) which requires that six screws retaining the rear of the unit are removed, the fan is disconnected from the circuit board (you must use two pairs of fine nosed pliers to do this or you will wreck the fragile socket or plug) and the six retaining screws for the board and the connecting ribbon cable (a PATA plug, lots of pins on the board – Ugh!) be removed. You also have to pull your drives which connnect directly to the board. Simply yanking the latter out is a prescription for catastrophe. The whole thing took me twenty minutes – one Philips screwdriver and two pairs of fine nosed pliers. And yes, my Border Terrier was in attendance.

The enclosure was immediately recognized by the MBA, but the speeds, measured with Xbench were disappointing, slightly slower than USB2:

Speeds with USB3 and 2012 MacBook Air.

So, a Phyrric victory. It works, but is slower. Still, no complaints about Mediasonic’s customer service. To revert to USB2 simply use a USB2 cable. USB3 cables are blue with blue connector inserts. USB2 cables are all colors with white connector inserts.

Second Update – March, 2013:

I added a second one of these boxes with 2 x 3TB drives. I’ll add two more when needed, as prices keep falling. The price of the box is now down to $120 and one each WD and Seagate drive (Main and Backup) ran $140 each. No issues in setup, and the box, connected with the supplied USB3 cable to a USB3-capable OS X machine was immediately recognized as a USB3 device, suggesting that Mediasonic is fitting the revised board referred to above to new inventory. Nice. Once again, this is not a hardware RAID device for sophisticated backup strategies. It’s simply for use as a simple and effective Main+Backup two HDD (in two pairs if needed) device for mass storage. Ideal for video. If your computer has USB2 only, that will work too, using the supplied cable which is backward-compatible.

Third update – July, 2012:

One year of 24/7 use later and no issues. The box works fine using an Orico USB43 card in my Mac Pro. No fan noise, no HDD failures, no issues.

Storage changes.

Over half a decade ago I decided it made no sense to own DVDs. Hard to house, ugly to look at and even harder to access. Let me see, is that filed under Actor, Director or Title? Which movies was Bogart in? You get the idea. If ever a product was suited to random access, database storage, it is your movie library.

And movie libraries still make a lot of sense. The much vaunted Netflix, with its 140,000 snail mail offerings, manages to offer only 10,000 of these streamed over broadband and they are some of the worst movies ever made. Even when you find something really good streamed it is as likely as not to have disappeared from your Wish List when you return to watch it later. The Amazon Prime library is near useless and the Apple iTunes one is devoid of classics with content here one day and gone the next.

So I started in a modest way many years ago and ripped my 200 DVDs to a 1tb disk drive housed in a two-drive enclosure with an identical backup clone. As the next 200 came along so did another enclosure and pair of drives, until you get to the mess I have today:

Storage for 1200 movies.

First, you will see that the drive boxes vary. No sooner does a solid box come along than it is discontinued and you are forced to use something else. Second, I do not trust fragile USB hubs so six USB cables make their way to the HackMini which is equipped with no fewer than 8 USB sockets. Third, every box adds a fan and noise is part of the equation. These are still distant enough from the viewing location that noise is not an issue, but you can definitely hear the fans.

So, something has to give. A couple of years ago 3tb drives started coming to market. That means 600 uncompressed movies per drive. But they were costly. Then, to make matters worse, the Thailand floods struck and half of global drive production disappeared. Prices doubled.

Now, drive prices have returned to sanity and there are more good enclosures to choose from at attractive prices. I did the math and concluded the idea of moving what was in six enclosures and twelve drives to one enclosure with four drives made sense, so I plonked down my cash for one of these:

Mediasonic four drive enclosure.

For photographers and cinematographers, there’s a lot that appeals here; it’s not just for movie buffs. While this enclosure does not offer RAID redundant storage, I do not want something I do not remotely understand. A simple clone allows me to switch to the backup if the main drive fails, as it has once during the life of my six separate enclosures. Simple, effective, no nuclear physics involved. CarbonCopyCloner runs incremental scheduled back-ups while I sleep.

The appeal of a modern enclosure like the Mediasonic includes the provision of both USB3.0 and eSata connectors, as well as the ability to take up to four 3tb drives with SATA3 supported. Disk drive buffers are now up to 64mb from 16mb a few years ago and 7200rpm is standard compared with the 5400rpm of yore. If you are moving large volumes of data then USB3.0 and SATA3 are night and day compared to their predecessors. If your purpose is simply data storage and occasional retrieval, as with movies, these technologies add little, but as their incremental cost is near zero, why not have them?

After running the numbers I quickly realized that the $730 spent on the new enclosure and drives (the latter are $150 for 3tb) is less than the $1000 or so the old drives and enclosures command on eBay. A more than ‘free’ upgrade, though I prefer not to think what this hardware ran me over the years. However, in addition to being free, the lower noise, lower heat and power consumption (8 fewer drives means 50 watts less power) and lower space demands make this upgrade a no brainer. Thank you, Moore’s Law. The major potential fly in the ointment here is the relatively unexplored reliability of 3tb drives. Still, with each backed-up, it’s a risk I can accept. I make a living doing other things so that I can watch movies, and do not depend on the movies to make my living. You can read a recent technical review of the 3tb Seagate Barracuda drives I will be using here. The warranty on the (non-XT) drives I will be using is only one year, but drives tend to fail when new or very old. Fingers crossed.

One immediate snag is that DVDpedia, the excellent Mac-only cataloging utility I use for movies, which provides ‘click-to-play’ links to six movie volumes, will now have to have its database rejiggered to point to the two new volumes. Mercifully, DVDpedia enjoys excellent support and the SQL commands which allow an instantaneous batch change of Volume names appears here. (See the following post for updated code). The alternative of manually changing file paths for 1,200 movies is not a realistic one.

The current version of DVDpedia, a mere $18, allows syncing of your home theater Mac catalog with any iDevice so that you can peruse your collection at leisure. You cannot initate play from the iPad or whatever, but it’s a handy feature. Another useful one is the ability to export your collection to the web, which I do monthly, and which you can see by going to the Links at the bottom of this page.

More details when I have converted everything. Here are the current drive performance data for the HackMini which runs a modest Core-i3 CPU and 8Gb of 1333mHz RAM; I also include the Geekbench CPU performance so that you can compare it with your machine:

Xbench disk performance for an external, USB2, SATA2, 1tb Samsung 7200rpm disk drive.

Geekbench CPU performance for the HackMini.

One word of advice. Avoid the Drobo solution. Overpriced with a poor reliability record. Making a capable high volume storage, high speed solution using component parts yourself is every bit as easy and likely to be far more reliable. And it will cost less. Much less.