AMS Venus T4U Review (3TB in a little black box) - The AMS Venus T4U (DS-2340UBK) is my dream machine. As I have data on lots of random IDE hard drives, this simple 4-bay hard drive enclosure is what I've been sorely needing. While you could make an entir

The AMS Venus T4U (DS-2340UBK) is my dream machine. As I have data on lots of random IDE hard drives, this simple 4-bay hard drive enclosure is what I've been sorely needing. While you could make an entire desktop tower with RAID and the works, my primary system has been a laptop. Thus I've survived on single hard drive enclosures, swapping drives in and out when necessary.

Is it worth buying? After a few weeks with it, my answer is yes.
Read on for more details, specs, and images....

The Product
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American Media Systems (AMS) makes a wide variety of products for enclosures, backplanes, etc. Their site http://www.amselectronics.com has quite a bunch. The AMS Venus T4U is a 4-bay IDE hard drive enclosure for consumers. It's not going to have enterprise-standard features but then, you don't need a server rack or a server tower either.

Sorry for the crappy images that follow (I took them on my webcam because that's the only thing I have right now)

It's a slick black box. Just enough to hold four hard drives and the equipment to power/connect them. Fully loaded, it probably weights 5-6 lbs. I'm running Seagate drives in 2 x 250 GB and 2 x 500 GB sizes. Each drive appears individually.. I did not play with any JBOD modes because I didn't want to lose the current data on those drives. Total: 1.5 TB storage (though real file space is less than that because the hard drive manufacturers define "Tera-byte" different).

(Review under construction)

Installation
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Where to Buy
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Newegg.com is currently selling them for $115.

I bought mine from Frys (the retail store - the web site doesn't seem to have this product listed) for only $80 on-sale. The sticker price was $150 but I believe this has since gone down since Newegg lists the retail as $125, and to bring out the market for the newer T4S (using SATA) model.

The Pros
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+ 4-bay for drives, one power cable and USB cable to worry about
+ Tray-less (you don't need to screw drives onto its own tray)
+ All thumb-screws
+ Screws hold to the chassis to keep the drives secured
+ USB Autopower (if enabled, will turn on when USB is plugged in and turn off if USB is removed or device detached)
+ Up to 3 TB storage (yea that's right, 4 x 750 GB drives)

The Cons
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- USB 2.0 interface - transfering data between drives still slow, dividing the bandwidth in half
- Use of screws that still need to be attached to the drives to slide in (must take out the screws to fit back into a desktop's normal 3.5" bay)
- Exactly 5 small thumb-screws for the outside, doesn't match the 16 larger thumb-screws to attach to the drives
- Needed to attach wires to IDE cable/power (esp the Molex connectors are troublesome to remove)
- No RAID support, only JBOD configurations

Final Remarks
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Next on my list is tackling the SATA version, the AMS Venus T4S (again available at Newegg, but a steeper $200). SATA drives with eSATA interface and some RAID support (though not RAID 5). I am making this my next birthday present to myself once I grab some 750 GB SATA drives)