Comments on: Cavalry Storage CADA-SA2 Series 2 TB USB / eSATA 2-bay RAID Personal Disk Array CADA002SA2-B – Includes eSATA Kit

By: Kaymee Photography

Kaymee Photography — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:38:21 +0000

I purchased this model because of the price and options, specifically being able to plug it in to an eSATA port. After getting everything setup (more below), the drive has worked wonderfully. With the included WD drives, the drive verify and storage is very nice. It works great as a backup system.

Now the problems. Setup was a bear! Given the fact that documentation is non-existent out of the box, I had to "rebuild" the drives twice, at over 12 hours EACH! The drive is supposed to be PnP, and maybe it is, but there were no clear instructions on setting it up. I plugged it in and it didn't work. I played with my eSATA connection and couldn't get it to work. I plugged it in to a USB and it worked fine so no drive issue. I then plugged in the included eSATA port and then couldn't figure out how to "format" the drives, so the 2nd rebuilding began. Finally, I found instructions online and after skipping 3-4 pages, found where to setup the software to make it work.

Without that setup fiasco, this product would be rated higher. It has worked fine for me since.

By: Norm W. Donaldson

Norm W. Donaldson — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:27:37 +0000

The documentation for this procuct is incomplete and required direct contact with the maunufacturer. That being said, once up & running it is an excellent value.

By: kkfredde

kkfredde — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:31:15 +0000

It was difficult to install, directions have alot to be desired. Drive is shipped with the drives unplugged from the socket, this requires the disassembly of the unit. Drive is also shipped raid “1,” wanted raid “0.” After 1 day of toying with the drive I got it to work. If you are uncomfortable with taking apart the unit and building a Raid array you might want to opt for a single drive thats plug and play. So far no problems with the drive. I do like the esata option, much faster read/write times compared to USB. I build high-end gaming machines, so I am used to building multi-array systems.

By: Ernesto Sabogal Gomez

Ernesto Sabogal Gomez — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:56:27 +0000

I was kind of worry after buying this disk because although I had read some reviews it wasn't after I bought it that the bad reviews appeared.

Documentation

No paper documentation, only a CD but really it is very bad.

Installation

Some reviews talk about hours of doing this correctly. When it arrived: shutdown computer, plug in power to the disk, plug esata cable to disk - computer, turn on disk, turn on computer, during POST the message of new drive recognized, into windows, into disk manager, format just in case, done. Five minutes. I am using Windows 7 RC x64.

This disk arrived RAID 1 as I needed so no problem or messing around changing to RAID 0 or RAID 0+1.

Performance

I used Everest to benchmark the disk.

Linear Read Middle: 74MB/s
Buffered Read: 101.8MB/s
Average read access: 12.98ms

Just for comparing, the results with my internal WD Velociraptor 300GB:

Linear read middle: 103.1MB/s
Buffered read: 245.8MB/s
Average read access: 6.87ms

Real performance:

I transfer a folder with +4400 files, 13.3GB from internal drive to this unit in 4:32, gives a rough 48.9MB/s

A second transfer with +28000 files, 92.9GB in 25:15, 61.3MB/s.

Not bad, in the "normal" range.

By: T. Neal

T. Neal — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:07:00 +0000

Setup is a little painful because they provided incorrect/insufficient documentation for the product (even on their website). Luckily I was able to contact customer service and she walked me through the setup (this included dis-assembling the drive array). Long story short, I have a nice 2TB RAID config, but can only get it working correctly with USB.