Conclusion:

With all the data in the world, a large amount of hard drive space is a requirement. The Eagle Tech Computers D-Series External Storage System, model ET-CSDU2F-BK, is a great choice for a hard drive enclosure which allows you to take up to two 750GB SATA hard drives and enable them as one hard drive. While you will not gain the performance that is usually associated with a RAID 0 configuration, you will have one large hard drive instead of two smaller drives.


The biggest issue I had with this unit was with the initial configuration when trying to install two hard drives. It is a fairly minor point, but it should be mentioned in the manual that pre-partitioned hard drives can prevent the enclosure from functioning. Other issues with this enclosure surround the implementation of RAID. It does not offer RAID 1 for redundancy, and why bother with RAID 0 if the performance actually suffers? The point of RAID 0 is speed, and there is no chance risking total data loss if just one of thr two drives in the array should fail.

This device works as advertised over all, but there is room for improvement. The first thing I would recommend is the addition of eSATA connectivity, which would allow you to benefit from the speed potential of the SATA hard drives installed. The second recommendation is to include another RAID option, mirroring (RAID 1). Multiple hard drives are great for increased capacity, however it would be nice if two drives could be installed and configured to create a mirror copy of the data.

A search of PriceGrabber shows this unit is available at Mwave.com for $69.00. There are cheaper single drive enclosures on the market, but given the ability to connect two drives in one enclosure, and support for RAID 0 and JBOD, this seems to be a fairly reasonable price for basic installations.

While I would like to give this enclosure a rating of "Highly Recommended" I find it difficult to do so since given two factors. The first is that the lack of eSATA connectivity hampers the performance, which seems key when sharing two high speed, high capacity drives in one enclosure. The second is that the RAID configurations available offer no real benefit, providing no extra speed and no data redundancy. If RAID 0 was faster (via eSATA), or if RAID 1 was even an option, this would be an extremely desirable enclosure.

Pros:

» USB 2.0 and Firewire connectivity
» Supports two SATA hard drives
» Up to 1.5TB of storage (possibly more)
» Driverless RAID 0/JBOD

Cons:

» No eSATA
» No mirroring
» No back-up Software
» RAID 0 provides no performance boost
» Need mention of pre-partitioned hard drives in manual

Special thanks to Eagle Tech Computers for providing the Eagle Tech Computers D-Series External Storage System to Bigbruin.com for review!