Lian-Li EX-503B
One of hot topics of recent was the release of the new Lian-Li EX-503B which in essence, is a multi-drive external storage box. Realizing that many people including me are looking for different solutions to back up their servers, I was very intrigued by this particular device. Why you ask, well, several reasons. For starters it sported a USB 3.0 port, supported all types of RAID (0,1,5,10, JBOD, port replication, and held 5 drives. So the next obvious question is: Is this a Drobo killer? The short answer is not really, as this is really a completely different product. To clarify, let me try and differentiate the two products and then we can get into how good this unit is.
EX-503B vs Drobo
Although we all want to compare the two, the truth is they are after different segments of the market. I believe the Drobo is aimed at a total, do all, be all, storage solution where as the EX-503 wants to be your storage expansion and wants to do it well. The major differences between these two devices is the Drobo gives you a ton of software, built in utilities, gives you flexible expansion, but it does it a price. That price is not only dollars but speed. In the other corner, you have a device like the EX-503B which does not offer utilities, not much in software except to setup the RAID, limited expandability, but it offers it as a much lower cost and performance that is unrivaled from any external unit or NAS I have ever seen. In short, it does not try to be an all in one solution but rather offers us a way to expand our storage or backup our systems, and it does that extremely well.
Suitability
This device has one purpose in life and that is to expand your storage and do it without a performance penalty. The way I view this box is for those who need to store or backup large amounts of data and want to do without giving up the performance. I believe this is the ideal box to attach to a server for backing up or synching large amounts of data quickly and cost effectively. Make no mistake, it will not offer you the software suite of something like the Drobo or Synology, which in most cases is not needed in a WHS backup application, but what it will offer you is a place to backup your WHS data either locally or to remove to an offsite backup location, and it will do it faster than any other solution I have ever seen.
The Box
The first you notice when you pull it out of the box is that the construction of this device is unmistakably Lian-li. The brushed aluminum finish and esthetics of the unit are outstanding with excellent attention to detail. When you open the drive door you can quickly see that this thing was designed to keep things cool not only for the hard drives, but the overall unit as well as the built in controller. When you look inside you see the 140mm fan which is positioned directly behind the hard drives themselves. When you power on the unit, the air flow is stellar with enough air moving to handle even the hottest Caviar Black drives which great spacing for air flow in between drives. As you would expect, the fan is almost silent despite moving a ton of air.
To insert drives you do have to mount them in a bracket first. I would have liked it better if they made it completely tool-less, however considering the market this playing in and that you could be moving this unit around, is probably not a show stopper. Once inserted, the drives are locked in place by a small plastic slider clip which securely keeps drives from sliding out which helps as you toss this in your car and move it offsite.
Setup
There are two ways of setting up your storage box. The first is using their software which is no more than a JMicron utility that lets you configure the box with the drive/RAID configuration you need. The software is very easy and straightforward but as I mentioned earlier, very limited. It does RAID setup and it it does it well. It will not however, support RAID expansion. Depending on what you are using this for, that may or may not be a problem. For me it was a non issue as I am using this for backup so if I needed to expand it, I could just pull out the drives, install larger drives, and rebuild the backup as I do not plan on using this as primary storage, after all, we are the home server community. If you have an existing array of say 3 drives, you will need to either create a separate array or you delete the array and rebuild it with 5 drives. This is not unique to this product and affects most of the products in the market segment. What was interesting is that the array was built in about 8 secs with three drives. I ran some speed tests, copied data to it, then I deleted the array, added two more drives, and recreated the array again it was ready to go in about 10 secs. Pretty impressive for building an array. As a side note, the software can be installed on any computer and once the unit has been configured it can be moved anywhere so you do not have to worry about installing stuff on your server.
Also, if you do not want to install software at all or if for some reason you cannot install the software, there is a switch in the back that lets you set the drive configuration that you want. After setting the desired configuration, pressing and holding the “activate” switch for 15 secs build and creates that array.
Hardware Switch
USB 3.0 Performance
One of the things that concerned me most when I first heard about this unit, is, would it perform. I have tried and seen many of these storage boxes only to be disappointed with sub-standard performance. I have no interest in spending money on a device that gets 10-15 megs/sec. If I was going to use this box as expanded storage for my home server, than I wanted some real performance especially since it was on a USB 3 interface. I am certainly happy to report that this device did not disappoint in terms of performance. It exceeded my expectations for a device like this and rivaled the performance of most servers. Transfers over the network were constant at ~104 Megs/sec with peaks of 115. Transfer within the local machine appeared to be limited only by the machines ability to write and hovered between constantly above 100 Megs/sec. As you can see from the benchmarks, write performance rivals some SSDs. Overall, the performance of this device is stellar and in terms of server expansion, it is really the perfect match. It is roughly 3-8x faster than NAS boxes such as the D-Link unit, Synology, or Drobo, and approximately 20-80% faster than USB 3 standalone drives.
Conclusion
In short, this is a great device for the right application and the form and finish is stellar. This unit is certainly not for everyone. If you need a suite of utilities, direct network attachment, and a more robust drive expandability than you should not get this box. If however you are looking for expanded storage or server backup, than look no further. This unit will not disappoint. If you believe what they claim on their website, it will accept drives up to 6T each so it should be a bit future proof. When 3T drives become a bit more affordable, this will be a great match and give you 12T of storage/backup in a small form factor.
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Category: BYOB, Windows Home Server
Can i ask? Your onboard raid 5 with same drives is getting R/W around? if different wonder why?
might be good podccast fodder
Where did you find this unit for sale? I've looked at the usual places but no one seems to carry it.
Got it from FrozenCPU.com
Out of stock at the moment. Thanks for the lead.
Im using one of these at the moment.
I have whsv1 virtualized using esxi (in a pc-q08b) and this box attached as direct storage.
Whs can see the individual drives and can add them to the pool, without installing any software.
Main issue is that ESXi 4.1 only supports usb2 so it can be a little bit slow sometimes. vSphere5 will fix this as it is supposedly going to support usb3 devices
How does eSata speed compare with USB3?
thanks so much for the writeup pcdoc. As I said elsewhere, I'm very interested in this box as it appears to be the thing I've been searching for for several years now. If only we could actually get some. I think I'm looking at getting 2 of them. And while it may not be a Drobo Killer for some, for me it really is, because Drobo was just about the only other box that seems to do what I'm looking for.
Has anybody found this case in stock anywhere? Seems to be only at frozencpu.com, and they are out of stock.
Hi Fredload,
Are you in the US? if yes you can call Ascent Technologies at 732-906-8080, This is the company I just ordered mine from and I got it in one day, I have been told they are the east coast dist and also supply FrozenCPU with this product. If you want to order from FrozenCPU I have been told they will have some very soon.
Hope this helps,
Thanks Ray, I will give them a call tomorrow. I have been looking everywhere with no luck. This is a big help.
Thanks again Ray. Ordered my box from FrozenCPU and it arrived today. Can't wait to get it all setup. And a big thanks to pcdoc for a great review and how to.
Don't Buy LIAN LI EX-503
Run in raid 0 and in raid 5 after 4 days it slow down my PC and after few min it change the drive into raw
No Support Form LIAN LI For help
DON'T BUY THIS SHIT ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
He's right.
I bought the EX 503B. Raid5 configuration 5x2TB. I have some problem. I sent email at Lian-Li tech Support, but no response.
It' s a good box, until you don't have problems…
I would like to ask EX-503 owners, your case shuts down after turning off the computer connected to it?
Because my EX-503 running all time (with computer turned off too) till I turn it off with power button I/O…
question, setting the EX-503 to JBOD and installing HDD for the first time, will the drives be formatting? IE I have drives that have content on them already, I dont have enough space on other drives to back up everything…
Question, got mu ex-503 a week ago and just noticed it seems to be working on the drives a lot when not accessed(can hear the drive heads moving), but the activity light don't light up. Just wondering if anybody else have noticed this and if it is normal…
WD drives can do that. In fact, it is usual. The firmware has build in functions to SCAN the drives from time to time to ensure longer drive life.
i just brick my lian-li ex503 when trying to update the firmware using the firmware download from lian website product page.
i had "wrong chip bla bla bla do no reset until you have correct firmware " THERES NO CORRECT FIRMWIRE FOR THIS , I COULD FIND ANY.
since the firmware update failed, now the lain-li give me blinking red light and the micron raid manager show
"no firmware information " and the browse and update are grey out "
what to do any solution?
and the hard drive aren't recognize in w7 64 bits, no disk management nothing.
I don't have any experience with this kind of unit, so this is potentially a noob question.
Is it possible to use this unit un-RAIDed?
ie. Can I install 5 HDDs to it, connect it to another computer via USB3, and have it see 5 individual HDDs?
yes
I just received a replacement from lain-li ex-503 , and again death on arrival NO FIRMWARE INSTALLED.
the firmware install is grey out and is not possible to do anything …
back to RMA again !!!!!!
I found the firmware is greyed out when attached by USB 3.0 or eSata to PC with no HDD installed.
After installing HDD the firmware update option was available – though when I checked online the latest firmware was older than the one installed – so I did nothing.
The latest driver R1.17.63.01 is available from Lian Li http://www.lian-li.com/v2/en/product/product06.ph…
But the RAID managment tool will not download (I tried the EX-50 download for RAID Managment tool and this worked fine – It is the same version)
I have tried the ex-503 with single HDD or Mirrored RAID but you are unable to have both single HDD and Mirrored RAID at the same time.
I have 3TB Mirrored Drives and all works well – but… after 6 Hours of continual copying via eSata connection the EX-503 gave up and started beeping alot – Windows 7 x64 PRO repeatedly attached then dropped the HDD. I shut everything down PC and ex-503 and restarted and tried USB 3.0 and eSata with no joy.
After coming back from work I tried again and continued the copy job with no issues ……so far – will keep you posted on outcome
Did you a feedback from Lian-Li?
I filled about 3 RMA and no answer…
I return mine after lian-li brike my hdd 3tb glad it was on warranty, i bought a synology ds412+ and im happy now
Nando, I'm not surprised about your experience. I think you did the right choice.
In this moment I'm wondering about Lian-Li.
It has a very nice product, but without some kind of support it's unuseful.
After 3 RMA without any feedback, I'm moving all the files out of the RAID5.
Luckly, I bought one hard disk for substitutions. The other RAID1 is full, but I'm using it to save
what I can.
I suspect that the REAL ORIGINE of my problems is the JMicron HW Raid Manager utility.
Now I'm copying 1TB from Lian-Li to the the additional disk and JMicron Manager is off:
seems going smooth.
I had 2 problems: at 2TB of occupied space the RAID5 got offline (changed from USB3 to eSata
and seemed to solve the problem).
Another problem: RAID5 goes offline when I try to copy a 36GB file. Is it too big? :-O
I have a degradeted RAID5 because LianLi doesn't like a disk: "PAGE 0 DAMAGE ERROR".
Nowhere in Internet there is an explanation about this string!
I made all the test on disk. The disk i perfect, but no way: LianLi EX-503B refused to add it again to the RAID5
chain.
I put another NEW disk and there was a failure in rebuilding after 1%: so I'm copying all
data out of EX-503B to other disks.
I have a degradeted RAID5 and I'm praying that all could go fine.
In my experience, you should not use h/w RAID outside of the enterprise because you are bound to a vendor which is not commiting to any SLA.
Software RAID has come a long way and it's perfectly up to the task.
Have any of you tried this unit for some time on a port multiplier config using LVM, VxVM or ZFS (whatever redundancy config you like)?
Thanks,