Anyone Have Experience with Cavalry External Drives?

[Eric Shubert]

Jim March wrote:
> On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 7:58 AM, Mark Phillips
> <mark at phillipsmarketing.biz> wrote:
>> I was looking at the Cavalry CADA-SA2-B (2 TB external eSata RAID 1 (2 X 2
>> TB drives)) drive as a backup drive for 5 users using BackupPC. Anyone have
>> experience with this product or Cavalry external drives in general. It must
>> be new as there aren't any user reviews on Newegg.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> Mark
> 
> Here's the problem: nobody can really answer that.
> 
> When you buy an external drive from a company that does NOT make hard
> disks themselves, you have no clue what's really in there until you
> either pop open the case or query it with a good format tool - gparted
> for example will tell you what the drive is.
> 
> Right now Western Digital makes the best drives, by a bit.  Seagate
> isn't far behind.  Maxtor is Seagate's budget line now, avoid.
> Hitachi sucks.  Toshiba isn't much better.
> 
> If you buy a "Cavalry", you don't know what the heck is in there...pig
> in a poke situation.
> 
> If they'll sell you a chassis with no drives in it so you can add your
> own, cool.
> 
> Jim

What Jim said. :)

I haven't tried Cavalry HW - been a little leary of them for no good 
reason, just gut feel. I could be off on that. So short answer is "no".

I've used Acomdata enclosures. Their customer service is outstanding. 
They handled returns/exchanges for me with no hassles, when the problem 
was the HDD I put in it. Oops.

I'll be using Acomdata enclosures from now on. I buy the bare drives 
separately, so I know what I'm getting (as Jim said). I wouldn't be 
surprised if Acomdata would tell you what's in a given unit if you asked 
them though.

-- 
-Eric 'shubes'