Mediasonic Dual Bay RAID Hard Drive Enclosures Review

Features and Specifications

Supporting Operating System	:		Microsoft Window 2000 / XP / VISTA and Mac OS
Partition Format	:		NTFS for Window 2000 / XP / VISTA
			HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) for Mac OS
Raid Setting	:		Single Mode: Computer will show up as two independent drives
			Raid 0 - Spanning Mode: Two HDDs will show up as one large single drive
			Raid 0 - Stripping Mode: Two HDDs will show up as one large single drive but speed performance will boost up
			Raid 1 - Mirroring Mode: Creating an extra copy set of data to second drive
Hard Disk Drive Jumper Setting	:		Master / Single
AC Power Adapter	:		Input: 100V - 240V ~ 50 / 60 Hz Max 1.5A; 75 ~ 100VA
			Output: 5V - 2A, 12V - 2A

Product Weight	:	620g
Product Dimension	:	145 (w) x 225 (L) x 59 (H) mm
Safety Specification	:	CE / FCC / ROHS
Product Origin	:	Taiwan

Enclosure modes:

Below are the jumper settings as detailed by the instruction manual provided by Mediasonic

SINGLE MODE or “Non-RAID Mode”:


This mode requires only 1 hard drive, but if two are used both will show as two independent drives. Mediasonic’s literature states that “This function can be use if only one HDD is installed. Or, two different brands or capacities of HDDs are installed.” However, our two identical Seagate 7200.10 320GB hard drives that we used for testing showed up as two independent 320GB drives.


RAID O - SPANNING MODE


This mode requires 2 hard drives but they do not need to be the same capacity. It provides no fault tolerance and does no error checking. If one of the hard drives does become damaged, then all data on both drives maybe lost. The two hard drives will show up as one large single double capacity drive and data is written sequentially filling one hard drive before starting to write to the second drive.


RAID O - STRIPPING MODE


Using this mode requires 2 hard drives of the same capacity, brand and model number. It provides no fault tolerance and does no error checking. If one hard drive becomes damaged then all data on both drives may be lost. The two hard drives will show up as one large single double capacity drive but read/write performance will be increase. This is because the array controller splits each piece of data across both HDDs in segments.


RAID 1 - MIRRORING MODE


Using this mode requires 2 hard drives of the same capacity, brand and model number. It provides fault tolerance from disk errors and single disk failure. Under RAID1, the array will create an extra copy (or mirror) of the data to the second drive. Only one drive will be visible to the computer, but read performance will be increased as both hard drives can read and provide the requested data. If one hard drive fails simple replacing the failed drive with another drive of the same capacity will allow the array to rebuild. However, if the second hard drive fails before the RIAD array is finished rebuilding your data will be lost.