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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 INSTALLATION AND TESTING

I will be using two Western Digital WD2500AAKS 250GB SATA hard drives inside the Mobilstor. Pressing one of the keys into the lock hole…

…pops the tray loose so it can be removed. At this point it's simply a matter of sliding the tray out and removing the protective rail so the drive can go in.

The drive is then held in place with screws, and then inserted back into the bay. With both drives in place, it's time to power everything up and configure a RAID array.

Building a “safe” (RAID 1) array was automatic and took about an hour and a half. When finished, the LCD displays the status of both drives. The following RAID modes are available, and again this info is taken from the manual:

BIG – Concatenation/Spanning
JBOD – Just a bunch of disks; bypass mode
FAST – RAID 0
SAFE – RAID 1 and mirror
SAFE33 – Creates two hard drive volumes where 1/3 of the volume is used for mirroring and the rest is used for Spanning (Big).
SAFE50 – Creates two hard drive volumes where ½ of the volume is used for mirroring and the rest is used for Spanning (Big).
RESERVED – N/A.
GUI – Configuration via LCD.

More info is available on the LCD, including the temperature of each drive. Drive 1 ran about 5 degrees warmer than drive 2 even after sitting idle for 2 hours. I switched the drives around to see if there would be any difference it temps, but the results were the same.

No management software is included in the box, although it's available for download on the Sans Digital website. While not required, it's a straightforward program that, among other things, lists the status of both drives and some basic info about them.