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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic Secure Backup, June 19, 2010
This review is from: SilverStone Dual Bay 2.5" Aluminum External HDD RAID Enclosure - Retail (Black) (Electronics)
I can't afford to risk my work or school documents to chance. This little baby is a solid enclosure, small with a bit of weight, but not hefty enough that you can't keep with you for travel. Excellent for hot swapping, and the eSATA connection makes backing up and sharing large amounts of files quick and efficient.
Like I said earlier, I needed something with a bit of security, and RAID 1 is perfect. To find this kind of capability in a 3.5" enclosure is uncommon, but in a 2.5" variant, unheard of. Overall, the price for this enclosure and two separate 2.5" drives is a bit steep for someone looking for basic backup. I threw two of these (Western Digital 320 GB Scorpio Black SATA 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Notebook Hard Drive WD3200BEKT) in there (notice a lot of people have complained about these not having the free-fall sensor: doesn't matter for this case because I'm using it as a home drive), total price around 200$. You can easily get 1 or 2 terabyte external drives for $120, but the RAID 1 capability is worth it. Since I have a laptop, it makes perfect sense. If my hard drive goes bad, I've got two spares to pop right in, format, boot and transfer my data from the remaining drive in the case. That kind of peace of mind in law school is worth it, especially considering I back-up about 160 gigs of music, movies, photos, and documents (documents every night, everything else monthly). Online backup isn't as practical, especially if something does happen. I don't want to be at the mercy of my internet and their servers to recover that much data over a period of days.
Not to mention there are features I don't even use that add to the audience this enclosure can satisfy. If you want to backup and stripe quickly with RAID 0 or if you want to turn two drives into "one" with JBOD, this will do it. Turn it off, switch the mode, and you've got a whole new system to play with.
Either way, I went in knowing I wanted a RAID 1 backup system that I could rely on time after time and SilverStone made that happen in a very affordable and convenient way.
Couldn't live or sleep at night without it.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exactly what it says it is, and very good at it...., February 26, 2010
This review is from: SilverStone Dual Bay 2.5" Aluminum External HDD RAID Enclosure - Retail (Black) (Electronics)
Yeah, my first ever "first ever" review! I had gotten frustrated over the last few months with trying to find a decent home-use external RAID tool. I tried out four different options, including NAS, and spent many hours and returns and found nothing adequate. I also use a laptop for my daily work and flit between work places a lot. I use portable hard drives to store my sensitive data since I don't have an integral solution in my laptop (no room for 2nd hard drive, no OS RAID, etc.). I've been maintaining two separate USB portable hard drives, the standard ones from WD, etc. However, I have lost 2 hard drives to failure and since I have several hundred GBs worth of ISOs, VMs and Database files, I've been manually copying these items between both portable Hard drives, which works but is still tedious. That and the fact that they are USBs makes the performance slow if I have to transfer between them or to the laptop and back.
So my dream was to find a portable device that was not too big (i.e., no 3.5" drives) plus had eSata plus had RAID. Fortunately, just last year (in the Autumn I think) SilverStone came out with this little beauty. I had never heard of SilverStone before and their products are not in stores, not just the big box stores (Best Buy, etc.) but also not in the speciality stores (MicroCenter, etc.). Got this from Amazon and it does exactly what it says it does. It has a manual RAID switch on the back that is factory-set to RAID 1. You do nead the power adapater (that's my only complaint, I'd like to power this via the laptop, but I might find an adapter for that too).
It worked right out of the box, took me 30 seconds to install the 2 640 GB 8 MB cache 2.5" drives (596 GB usuable), plugged in the eSata cable, plugged in the unit, and it started up in a second flat (I've used it now on 3 different machines, and it worked fine in each case). Via Disk Management you do have to initialize it (MBR in this case, no need for GPT), give it a drive name, and do a quick format in NTFS. The whole process took about 3 minutes from opening the box until the drive showed up in Windows Explorer. From there I tested the eSata speed. It goes at about 80 MB/s, which is more than fast enough over my previous USB options. As a test I did a 20 GB VM from the device to my laptop and it went in about 4 minutes, so I think that is pretty standard for eSata, so that part works as advertised. I think the speed may be a little slow compared to a 3.5" internal eSata connection, but only because of the 8MB cache and the RAID 1 configuration. It was really neat to see the 2 hard drive lights blinking simultaneously during a copy operation onto the device, so it seems to be handling the RAID just fine too.
At some point I'll test taking out a hard drive and see what happens. Otherwise, if it lasts a good 3 or more years, I'll call it a definite success!
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Real quality, September 3, 2010
This review is from: SilverStone Dual Bay 2.5" Aluminum External HDD RAID Enclosure - Retail (Black) (Electronics)
This is the fastest external enclosure around. Great quality, and you can swap drives (pairs) and still maintain the RAID0 volume. Very smooth design and look. I have two so far.
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