Introduction:

CFI Enclosure is dedicated to hard drive enclosures, a large portion of them dealing with RAID and mass external storage. This is the second hard drive enclosure I have reviewed from CFI. That unit performed very well in its role, but my big complaint was that it seemed limited by having only an e-Sata interface. I know of no one else who has e-Sata, so portability is an issue. When I was doing the first review, CFI informed us they were working on a USB version of the enclosure. On this end, CFI has sent what at first glance is a nearly identical unit, using USB 2.0 instead.

Retail box

Retail side

Packing

Specs:

• CFI-B4043UA [USB]

• Front Panel [ABS] Chasis [SECC]

• 135 x 180 x 255mm / 2.7kg (5.9lb)

• 4 x 3.5" HDD Serial ATA (SATA)

• JBOD (standard mode) Span (combine mode)

• 1 x 80mm ball-bearing fan

• USB2.0 (480Mbits/s)

• 150W (12V 20A) UL/CSA/TUV/CE

• 2 Cubit Ft (4 pcs per master carton)

Features:

• Extremely compact size RAID storage (JBOD/Spanned).

• Custom Serial ATA (SATA) to USB 2.0 chip with RAID mode adjust.

• Support 3TB+ capacity*, Fully Tested with 750GB HDD

• Tray-Free direct connect backplane swappable design.

• Vented housing design, 80mm ball-bearing fan.

• Auto power ON/OFF function.

First impressions:

Front opened

Back panel

Accessories

Physically the two actually are only different in a few areas; obviously there is a USB “B” type port on the rear of the unit, as well as two extra dip switches. The unit I received also has a very nice, very shiny, black paint job.

Features

Side panel

Cover removed

Internally, I noticed right away that things are not quite as tidy, more cables are loose and visible after taking the cover off. Two IDE cables go to the connectors, which convert it into the same standard SATA connector as the CFI-B4043ER.

Top view

Side view

Cooling fan

While there is a small potential for speed loss when converting formats. USB 2.0 should be the limiting factor in speeds anyway.

Cables

IDE cables

HDD installed

The good feature of the CFI-B4043UA, all thumbscrews for tool-less install of the drives, remain untouched. Install takes only a few minutes, and everything is held securely in the sleds.

For the performance differences, while they call it a RAID enclosure, it does not do any of features that really fall into the “Redundant” array. You can set one of the dip switches to ether show all the drives plugged into the sleds on their own, or you can set things up so they will appear to Windows or OSX as a single drive.

Fully loaded

Thumbscrews

Dip Switches

There is one advantage to spanning the drives together, other than simplifying your drive list. If you had two 3GB drives, you could store a 6GB file on the combined drive (Barring any formatting loss). Though this isn’t really going to be a big deal for anyone these days I think, when was the last time you had a 100GB file you wanted to transfer over USB? It would let you keep 400GB of movies on 2 250GB drives instead of having to split it up.

4 drives 8 partitions

4 Drives, 1 Partition, 1.36TB

Performance:

So, on to testing. This is a chart comparing the CFI to two enclosures that use Gigabit Ethernet as their interface. The DS107+ is roughly $330, the N5200 closer to $1000.

There are no surprises to be had. Like I said before, USB 2.0 is going to be the limiting factor here. 25MB/sec was my average speed during testing. (uploading and downloading large files) This is vs. the 60MB/sec when using e-Sata. However, if you compare it to a much more expensive ‘TheCus 5200” and its gigabit Ethernet connection, it is very good performance/price ratio.

Conclusion:

Online

Up and running.

It doesn’t get much simpler than this for a 4 slot external enclosure. Slide the drives in, select what mode you want and plug it in and go. With the USB format, the enclosure is portable between systems, anything after Windows 98 doesn’t need drivers and all the drives can be combined into a single drive. CFI Enclosure has put this at a MSRP of $159 (US, Canadian it doesn't matter anymore ^_^ )  and I think it is a good match.

Big thanks go out to CFI for sending in this unit for review.

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