Date: September 15th, 2008
Article by: Jackie Mueller (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Sans Digital
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PRODUCT FEATURES AND SPECIFICATIONS
- Hardware RAID engine, supporting RAID 0, RAID 1, Spanning, JBOD, SAFE33, and SAFE50.
- Drive interface: 2 x 3.5" SATA I / SATA II hard drive.
- Removable trays for fast access of additional hard drives and easy trouble shooting.
- Utilizing the latest RAID chipset, supporting SAFE 33 / SAFE50 mode.
- SAFE33 / SAFE50 creates two hard drive volumes where 1/3 or 1/2 of the hard drive volume is used for mirroring and the rest is used for spanning (Big).
- Temperature controlled cooling fan for quieter operations.
- Supports Windows, Linux, and MAC OS X.
It might be easy to mistake this product for a NAS, but technically it is a DAS (Direct Attached Storage). One of the main differences between the two devices is that a NAS will work independently of a PC once configured, but a DAS will not. In simplest terms, think of a DAS as a more robust version of an external hard drive.
The big selling point here is the option to use RAID 0/1, JBOD, SAFE33 and SAFE50. I had not heard of the latter two configurations prior to this review, but it looks to be a great option in an environment that can take advantage of it.
PRODUCT COMPOSITION
The design of the packaging isn't much to speak of, but it is nice and compact and the contents inside are well protected by foam blocks. Color choices for the enclosure are silver or black.
Along with the enclosure, inside there is a power cord, four HDD tray keys, screws, USB 2.0 cable, eSATA cable, quick install manual, PCI bracket with an eSATA port, and a full version of NTI Shadow backup software . Everything needed to get up and running is provided right out of the box.
