Setup & Usage
Getting the ToughTech Duo setup is very easy. Just plug in the power and connect it to your computer by either USB, eSATA or Firewire. Then just turn on your system and hit the power switch on the back of the enclosure. When you turn the drive on the display will light up and tell you what RAID mode the drives are in and the status.
You can cycle through the menu system by using the up and down button. By cycling through you can change the RAID mode, see the temperatures of the drives and see the status of the drives.
Changing the RAID mode is extremely easy. When you get to the change RAID mode just hit enter, then you can select either RAID 0 or RAID 1 by using the up and down keys. It will prompt you that it will erase all data on the drives. Hit enter to confirm and it will build the new RAID array. It really is that simple.
To test the speed of the ToughTech Duo we used HDTune Pro’s read and write benchmark. I tested both the USB 2.0 and eSATA connections. I ran the benchmarks at both RAID 0 (stripe) and RAID 1 (mirror) configurations. When in RAID 0 the drive showed up as a single 1.5TB drive whereas in RAID 1 it showed up as 750GB.
eSATA Results
USB Results
As you see when the drive is in RAID 0 mode it performs a little bit better. Mirroring or RAID 1 is mainly for data redundancy rather than speed.
