SilverStone TS421S 4-Disk SATA/SAS Disk Enclosure

Setting up the TS421S was straightforward albeit obviously not as trivial as a lower-end single/dual bay drive enclosure. I appreciate the ECP01 adapter included so the 12V power source is only supplied when the target system is powered up, rather than just using a conventional AC/DC power adapter.

The mini-SAS SFF8087 to SFF8088 adapter is also easy and robust for connecting to four SATA/SAS ports internally on the system to provide for the SFF8088 interface. I tested this on a system using both the included four-SATA to SFF8087 cable and then also picked up a Mini SAS SFF-8643 to Mini SAS 36Pin SFF-8087 Cable. My more extensive I/O testing with this device the past few weeks has been done with the Tyan Tempest HX S7100 Xeon Scalable motherboard; with this single cable it's nice going from just a single mini SAS HD connector to SFF8087 and then the external SFF8088 cable while allowing full I/O capabilities of four SATA 3.0 SSDs.

For this testing I was using four of the ADATA SU700 120GB SSDs for testing.

The testing has been going very well and have not run into any issues with the SilverStone TS421S, including any thermal troubles when putting all four SSDs into RAID testing. No Linux issues to speak of with this tower storage device being straight-forward and just adapting the SAS/SATA interface to offer an external SFF-8088-based disk enclosure.

If you have a need for a four-disk external storage enclosure, the SilverStone TS421S is certainly a high-end device that works very well. The build quality is great, there is a lock for each 2.5-inch bay, and has a PWM fan for ensuring sufficient cooling. The enclosure isn't too portable between systems unless each system has a SFF8088 port, but SilverStone does sell their SFF8087 to SFF8088 adapter and other cables individually as well, plus an assortment of other SAS SFF cables can be found at most major Internet retailers.

The TS421S enclosure can be found from Internet retailers like NewEgg for just over $200 USD. I've been spending a fair amount of time running various Linux Btrfs RAID / EXT4 MDADM RAID and other multi-disk benchmarks from this enclosure, all of those results will be published in the next few days.