E23 Inc

For E2128J’s features, compatibility, price, and quality/craftsmanship, there is not a single competing item from any other competitors, and here is why.

First of all, there is no LCD Display on any of the SAS JBOD enclosure from all competitors. The LCD on E2128J can display much critical and useful enclosure information such as: Product name, Firmware version, Enclosure ID, Temperature status, Fan status, and Power status. The Enclosure ID is typically important in a multiple boxes situation.

Some JBODs from named brand companies have good quality, but they also carry a very high price tag, and those JBODs are only guaranteed to work with the same brand of SAS RAID controllers, and almost all of them provides no HDD trays if not buying along with disks, instead, they provide the Blank Slot Filler for the empty HDD slots on the enclosure. Disk prices from these named brands are much higher than what users/resellers can get from the open-market or distribution channels. E2128J provides all 12 HDD trays, and do not force users/resellers to buy disks with it.

Some other JBODs from chassis vendors and/or motherboard vendors cost a little less, but they may have less features and less-quality as well. Those JBODs typically use cables between the IO Module to the backplane. They claim to support many SAS RAID adapters and they claim to support multiple boxes chaining, but the field applications have found those claims are not totally true. They claim to utilize SES for enclosure management, but they do not specify how and what are really being monitored, managed, and reported to the RAID adapter's eventlog. On the other hand, with E2128J, we list all the details of what functions work to which degree, so that there is no guessing and no false expectations.

For detail of E2128J compatibility list, please see the compatibility list(PDF).