Accordance ARAID M100

The M100 is installed in a 5.25" drive bay in a flash.

The principle behind the ARAID M100 from Accordance is relatively simple: it's a 5.25" rack-mounted unit that is connected via UltraATA. The front of the M100 has two removable drive slots for 2.5" hard drives. The M100 essentially resembles the already tested Accordance ARAID 2000 , with the difference that the M100 uses compact notebook hard drives.

Its slim format also makes the M100 suitable for systems that don't have much more room for expansion. The two built-in hard drives are mirrored in a RAID 1 setup. The nice thing about this is that no drivers are required; the M100 takes care of the mirroring internally. Current capacities of 100 GB are enough to pack away a useful amount of data. The M100 indicates a defective hard drive immediately by way of the corresponding LED. If the drive is exchanged, the restore process begins automatically.

While the M100 also makes a good showing as a system drive, we are more concerned with backup performance. Hopefully no one out there believes that backing up to disk storage in one and the same system is anything approaching a secure solution.

Synchronization can also be started separately. This is useful, for example, for several hard drives, so that they can be exchanged sequentially on a daily or some other basis. Pressure on the depressed function keys releases one of the drives. If it is exchanged, synchronization begins upon pressing the same key again.

The removable system is mechanically precise, and supports any 2.5" hard drive using the UltraATA/100 interface.