Monitoring Via An Old Fashioned Serial Port
The ACS-75211 supports monitoring, but only via an old-fashioned serial port, which can be found on fewer and fewer motherboards today, since the interface is slow and not very flexible. You thus may have to purchase an add-on card with one or two old serial ports on it. The monitoring software is reasonably intuitive and allows the user to specify an email account, to which the Windows service will notify email recipients in the event of a drive failure. However, the installation process is unnecessarily time-consuming. First, you have to lock the front covers, before you can hook up the serial cable, which must be routed around the host PC to reach the desired COM port. An internal USB connection would have been much more practical, especially given the device's $300 price tag. I don't believe it is asking too much to have a USB interface; especially as you still have to purchase two hard drives, which are not included with the device.
