Installation & Testing
Getting your drives in the enclosure is really simple and does not require any tools, screws, etc. We will be using 2 750GB Samsung SATA drives. First you want to open the drive covers and just slide your drives in. It really is that easy, when you close the drive doors that locks the drives into place. If you need to get the drives out it’s just as simple because when you open the drive doors that releases the drives so you can easily slide them out.
To test the speeds of the enclosure I used HDTune Pro 3.5 to test read and write speeds. For these tests I had the drives setup in JBOD (Non-RAID). I tested both USB and eSATA connections, here are the results…
USB
eSATA
This is a RAID enclosure so how do we go about setting up RAID on this drive? It is really simple, on the back of the enclosure there is a RAID selection switch. In the manual it illustrates how to set the switches for the different settings. So once you have the setting you want you can power on the device then wait a second and hit the reset button on the back. The will apply the new RAID settings and if needed the drives will be rebuilt.
This enclosure supports JBOD (Non-RAID), BIG (Concatenation), Fast (RAID 0), Safe (RAID 1), Safe33 (RAID 1, SAFE 33%, BIG 67%), and Safe50 (RAID 1, SAFE 50%, BIG 50%). So there are many different modes to choose from.
Note when using the eSATA connector with 2 hard drives if the host cannot support the port multiplier function the computer will not be able to detect 2 hard drives simultaneously. This was the case with our test system, so using eSATA we were only limited to one drive.
