 Welcome to my unboxing of the MediaSonic Pro Box H8-2-SU3S2. I think what they mean to say is it's an 8X, it's an 8-bay USB 3 external hard drive enclosure and there's a couple things that are pretty cool about it. So I'm going to run through everything MediaSonic has to say about it and then I'm going to tell you what I think is interesting. So first of all it supports 8 hard drives of different branding capacity. You can throw whatever you want in there, although with an enclosure like this I don't think I'd really recommend it. Okay it supports up to 24 terabytes. Yes, that's 3 terabytes times 8 bays. It has one button interface selection so you can flexible alternative interface selection by simply pressing the button. Ah yes, so the interface, meaning either eSATA or USB 3 because it does support both of those transfer methods. It's got a security lock because you don't want people running along and stealing your hard drives. Force convection process for cooling. Power sync. Powers off and on synchronized with the PC. That's very handy because you don't need to access data that's plugged in by eSATA unless the system is powered on. Very nice. Supports hard drive hot swap. 8 hard drives supported. And smart fan, comes with auto slash manual modes, 3 levels of speed for best convention. Supports Windows 7, eSATA USB 3, we've mentioned that before. Alright moving along to the side we see what it looks like from the back. Moving along to the back we see what it looks like from the front and the side. So far this is all stuff that's been covered. Force convection process, power sync, one button. Okay moving back along to the other side. Okay hold on a minute. Ah here we go. This is interesting. Here is a comparison chart. So we're showing USB 3 versus eSATA versus USB 2. USB 2 is slow, eSATA is fast and USB 3 is super speed. So in practical terms USB 3 and eSATA probably aren't going to give you much of a difference in terms of performance because the way I would install drives in an enclosure like this is going to be well not able to saturate an eSATA connection. So these are all theoretical maximums that you see in that graph on the back. So let's go ahead and open it up and don't worry I will tell you the part about what I think is interesting about it. Coming soon. First the accessories. So the first accessory is an eSATA cable. Very nice. Next accessory is a USB 3 cable that's A to B. Oh cameraman says it is Mac compatible. So thank you for that cameraman. Next we have hard drive rails including a screwdriver for you to install said rails and screws for you to install said rails. Next we have a power supply cable. So the power supply is built right into the unit which is nice because you don't have to deal with that external power brick nonsense. Okay we've got nice closed cell foam. Very very thick so you've got like almost 2 inches of foam on every side of the unit so I wouldn't worry too much about it being damaged and trying to wow it's heavy. Once you load this thing up with hard drives it's going to weigh like a ton. Alright so let's open this baby up. Okay there it is. The Pro Box 8 bay USB 3 eSATA hard drive enclosure. So why don't we start at the front since that's a very natural place to start. How do I open it? You know what why don't I open it first give me a sec. So by plugging in the key here I can unlock and open the door so you can see I can remove my hard drive cage doors then I install my rails on the drives and then I throw the drives back into here. So I am finally going to tell you what I think is so cool about this enclosure. This enclosure includes an 8 port multiplier. So what that means is if you want to access all of the SATA ports so that is the 8 ports you can do that whole thing through a single eSATA interface back here or USB 3 interface. The eSATA one is more interesting to me though. So a port multiplier this is not a raid box this is just a straight 1 SATA to 8 SATA port multiplier which is great because compared to competing solutions which might have 2 eSATA interfaces on the back and then 2 4 port multipliers this allows you to configure a raid across up to 8 drives using a single port. So you can actually plug this in to your Intel controller assuming your board uses the Intel controller for its eSATA and you can configure like an 8 drive raid 5 for example which is awesome. Now if the Intel controller is not fast enough for you you don't want to use like a software mode you can actually take proper raid cards and you can plug them into one port here. Now you're going to be bandwidth limited in terms of the single eSATA connection but even 8 drives in like a raid 5 or a raid 6 shouldn't be bottlenecked too much by an eSATA 300 megabit per second connection. So did I say 3 gigabit per second connection? Shouldn't be bottlenecked too much so that means that you are going to have excellent performance to up to 8 drives at a time. So cameraman is showing us the eSATA and the USB 3 indicators, the fan indicators as well as the eSATA and USB 3 indicators. Okay I'm not sure which is which. Okay finally we have the interface change button, the sync button and the fan button so these are all the LEDs and what nots. Another thing that's interesting about this particular drive enclosure is that it looks very nice. See it's got like a nice matte black finish going on there. On the back we can see two 80mm fans and what's cool about those fans is they are easily user replaceable. Yes, MediaSonic will not void you or your warranty for replacing those fans with something else. I think that is a great feature right there. There's our built in power supply down there at the bottom. That's part of what gives the unit its weight. Finally at the back we have a Kensington lock right here so that nobody just runs along, steals your whole 24TB tower of precious family memories and then runs off with it. And I think that is pretty much everything I wanted to say about this 8 bay hard drive tower so I'm going to go ahead and close it up, take the key and swallow it.