Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 5
IT'S A GREAT MACHINE!!!!!
This was/is a perfect solution for my company. The technical support office was amazing when I had a question. They got me up and running in less than 20 min after I contacted them and walk me through the setup configuration. I wanted to do something different from the norm and they assisted me without hesitation and it works GREAT!!!!!!! I recommend this to any and all who may be considering buying it. BOTTOM LINE - GET IT!!!!GENESIS PRODUCTION, INC (04 Jul 2018, 23:57)
Excellent product - even better customer service!
Background: I'm not a professional tech person, but am a fairly techy home-user. I'm very much into taking and editing home videos - lots of them. In all of our family vacations, I have them recorded on video 80-90% of the time, and still photos the rest. I am anticipating purchasing a 4K video-capable camera in the very near future (Panasonic GH4 vs the wallet-emptying Sony a7iiR), as well as a quadcopter drone with 4K camera (I've been eyeing the Yuneec Typhoon 4K); after this, my storage space problem will only magnify. I've had my share of home servers, then NAS, and pretty much have filled up my full-tower with HDDs, effectively turning my PC into a theater. I prefer not to edit video from files residing on server or NAS. So, huge storage space and fast transfer speed are what I’m always after. Low and behold, I came upon this T12 from DATOptic -- it's almost heaven-sent. I have made very few reviews in the past, but for this particular product, I think it deserves a huge plug. It is what I need, and it does what it’s supposed to do very simply, and very well. Best of all, the tech support has been nothing but spectacular. You’ll get real live humans -- none of this automated stuff or outsourced overseas reading from the cookbook stuff. I called twice, and both times I talked to Sam, who I think is the man himself behind this product; he has a wealth of knowledge and knows the product inside out. And he seems to really want the product to work FOR YOU. Here is my experience so far: Shipping: it takes a total of three days to get my T12 box (I'm in SoCal). Appearance & First impression: the box is very well packed. The unit itself is as you can expect, about the size of a full PC Tower; it is well built and feels solid with a heavy-duty chassis. The appearance of this unit suits me very well; it exudes simple no-nonsense toughness and capability. If I could use one word to describe: handsome; if two: ruggedly handsome. (For what it’s worth, the BACK of the unit actually also looks handsome; too bad it doesn’t see much of the light of day in my setup). Setup: Being used to having at least 800W PSU in my rigs, I was a little perplexed to see a 400W PSU in this unit, expecting at least a 500W unit. I called DATOptic about this and was given an excellent explanation, which more than sufficiently allays my fear. Basically, and I hope I got all the details correctly: even if I have all 12 bays occupied (almost there, I need to get 4 more 6TB!), the HDD are not all booted up at the same time, but instead are staggered, and Sam told me that the timing is programmable (default @ 0.7sec, and I ain’t messing with that). Sam also explained that even if all HDDs are turned on at the same time, the spin-up of 12V @ 2A and logic 5V @ 1A will be roughly 30W per HDD or 360W total. But no system does that, because it will stress out the 12V rail of the PSU. (OK, this was almost verbatim from Sam, cuz that was way over my head to have come up by myself). Sam assures me that at the heaviest power usage of writing and reading, the entire system uses about 220W max. Tray-less installation: simply love it! I was a little confused at first, initially oblivious of the fact that this was advertised as “tray-less”, and because every other massive storage system I had in the past has one form of the tray or another. So I was looking for the tray thingy to screw or snap my 8 existing HDD into place, until I realize that it is simply a matter of safely holding the HDD, inserting it, and then closing the front bay door. I took a peek inside the bay, and there is a lever in the back that is connected to the front bay door, which pushes the HDD back out when the door is fully opened. Thus, do NOT open the bay door unless you want to remove the HDD, because it is in one motion. For this reason, I keep all my bay doors locked until I need to open to remove any HDD. To form good habit, I am now even locking the empty bays, making a routine out of unlocking and opening, although I don’t anticipate doing this too often. Again, I simply love the tray-less convenience -- it was such a pleasant surprise -- as long as I keep in mind that opening the door is disengaging the HDD. You can probably install all 12 drives in less than one minute; it’ll probably take longer to open the hard drives from their packaging. Just please take my advice to lock your bay doors. Airflow & Noise: there are 4x 80mm fans in the back; airflow is passively in from the front and blown out to the back, pretty straightforward. The two sets of double fans are handsomely housed in silver metal against the black rear of the chassis – as mentioned before, I wish this can be proudly displayed somehow. Noise: this unit is quiet. I know this is subjective, but for me, turning on the power after connecting the included Thunderbolt cable to the tower and my PC (ASUS Z87 Pro Thunderbolt), I can only hear a click of the power switch and that's it; the fan noise is hardly noticeable. RAID Set up: I followed T12-S6.TB2's quick guide, a very simple one. Following Sam’s advice, instead of using the driver on CD, I download from DATOptic’s website to ensure the latest version. Once installed, I run HPPT Proxy 64 in MRAID folder, using login as admin and pw: 0000. I was able to login to the pop-up web-browser RAID GUI. The entire set up takes less than half an hour. Since I still have some time and disk space with my existing rigs before I need to use the T12, I decided to run some tests. With Sam’s suggestion, I created a RAID5 and RAID6 w/o initialization and check the speed, both RAID sets read/write over 1100MB/s with AJA Speed test. And while it was running speed test, I removed an HDD by opening a bay door (remember: opening a bay = removing the HDD), there is no hiccup or any indication to AJA speed test program; the speed test continued without skipping a beat about a drive having been removed -- of course the alarm went off. I did check the events log, and indeed it recorded that an HDD in slot xx had been moved and the RAID volume has been degraded, as it should. There are lot more features in this box, some of them I'm not quite sure what to do with it...yet. For now, I am using the default settings, but suffice it to say that with this unit, I just expanded my RAID understanding a little more, of course with due credits to Sam’s expert help. I am determined to fiddle with it more in the next few weeks, once I have more time and understand more of these features and settings. I really want to know this thing really well before I populate it with my precious family videos. Pros: fast shipping; well-built; tray-less (highly recommended!); quiet; GREAT tech support. And oh yeah, did I mention tech support is LIFE-TIME? (“Wait, I don’t have to pay more for an extra year of tech support? Or two-year deal? Or three-year deal?” Nope, how about LIFE-TIME, included, Free??!!). Cons: it’s not a 16-bay ;) Tips: 1- I recommend potential users to download the manual and read it beforehand, it helps to understand the bells and whistles of this system. 2- Download the latest driver from DATOptic website. 3- Keep the bay doors locked, since opening the doors means ejecting the HDD inside. 4- “Play” with it; it seems to have a lot to offer. Overall this is a great investment so far. I strongly recommend this product and the company behind it. Will try to update at some point once I have this running for several months.C. MICHAEL DANG
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