Installation and Operation:
Installation of the hard disk drives is accomplished by removing four screws on the back panel and sliding the drive tray out the back of the enclosure. The hard disk drives can then be installed in the tray. The bottom drive plugs directly into the SATA connector located on the controller and the top drive is connected with the provided SATA cable and power connection. Both drives are then secured in place with the screws provided. The images below show the SATA connections, bottom drive installed, and finally the top hard drive installed.
After installing the hard drives you need to determine which configuration suits your needs. Mapower gives you the following choices: SPAN, Normal, RAID-0, RAID-1, SAFE-33 and SAFE-50. SPAN also known as JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) concatenates the first hard disk drive with the second, essentially appending the second drive to the end of the first so they appear and behave as one logical volume in your computer. Although it isn't technically a RAID (Redundant Array of independent Disks) mode it is often grouped into discussions on RAID because its creation is similar to other RAID modes. Normal is exactly that, both hard disk drives will be visible to your computer and operate as two separate and distinct drives on your system. RAID-0, which is also known as striping because of the way it handles data writes, is similar to span in that it will combine both drives making them appear as one larger volume to your computer. Unlike SPAN which appends one drive to the end of another, RAID-0 stripes data across both drives simultaneously. This can result in a large performance gain, but since the data is essentially split equally between the two drives, if one fails you lose everything. Whereas a failure of one drive in the spanned mode should still allow you to access information that remained on the operational hard drive. RAID-1 is commonly referred to as mirroring because one hard drive is essentially a mirror image of the other. Simplistically this means that only one of the two hard drives is visible to your system and any data written to it is automatically copied to the second hard drive. This mode is popular for data that needs to be backed up. Since RAID-1 keeps identical copies of the information on two separate hard drives, data can survive a single hard disk failure.
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The RAID-0 and RAID-1 modes require at least two identically sized partitions, this means that if you install two different sized hard drives, logical volume sizes are based on the smaller of the two drives and the left over space on the larger drive is essentially unusable. For example if you installed a 100GB hard drive and a 160GB hard drive the TB32CS will treat them as two 100GB hard drives and you will lose the additional 60GB on the larger drive. This is a limit of the RAID implementation, not the Mapower TB32CS.
