PlanetAudio editBox EB4CR-1000 review

We were impressed with Iomega's new Power Pro desktop storage appliance when we looked at it earlier this year but the editBox EB4CR ups the ante by packing even more expansion opportunities. Along with a pair of FireWire 800 ports, you get FireWire 400, USB2 and even eSATA, allowing this appliance to cover all the bases for local attachment.

The EB4CR is primarily aimed at business users looking for a high-performance storage solution with good fault tolerance. The sleek, brushed aluminium chassis looks smarter that the Iomega alternative but it's not as well built: the side panels aren't as solid and could easily get dented.

A plus point is the drive hot-swap carrier locks, as these are proper key lock models whereas Iomega uses flimsy plastic hex keys. The four bays are easily accessed from behind the front door and the 250GB Seagate Barracudas ES drives are fitted in sturdy hot-swap carriers.

Another useful feature is the large 8cm diameter cooling fan at the rear being fitted in a removable cage, so in the event of a fan failure you could swap it out without any downtime. We also found noise levels were extremely low, making the array a good silent partner on the desktop.

Initial installation is simple, as the populated systems default to a four drive RAID5 array. If you're loading your own drives then you use the LCD panel and buttons underneath to pick from RAID5 or RAID0. It's at this stage that a complete lack of user documentation becomes really irritating as the drive status LEDs aren't discussed in the flimsy quick-start guide and no-one we asked could give a definitive explanation of why the top drive had a solid green light and three below were orange.

There's also a serial port at the rear and the unit comes with a serial cable, which PlanetAudio advised was only for firmware upgrades. We discovered it can also be used with Accusys' StorConn monitoring utility - which isn't included. What's more, manuals aren't available for download anywhere (and ignore the website when it declares that the EB4CR is an iSCSI appliance - it isn't).

As a plug and go appliance, though, the EB4CR hits the spot. We connected it to a Boston Supermicro dual 3GHz Xeon 5160 system running Windows Vista and equipped with a Silicon Image eSATA RAID controller, and it was picked up immediately. The eSATA port delivered for speed, with Iometer reporting good raw read and write speeds of 71MB/sec and 56MB/sec respectively.

Real-world tests were also tops: copying a 4.5GB disk image file to the array and back again returned 52MB/sec and 43MB/sec. Watch performance take a nose-dive if you go for the USB port, though, as the same file-copy operations saw read and write speeds drop to 28MB/sec and 22MB/sec for this connection.

The editBox EB4HR is indisputably fast, with the eSATA port returning good overall speeds. However, it's not good value, as although Iomega's 2TB Power Pro doesn't have an eSATA port it does offer twice the capacity for a lot less cash - and its bundle includes good backup software.

Author: Dave Mitchell