Comparing External RAID Housings
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Page 1:Backing Up Data To A Hard Drive
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Page 2:The Perfect Backup Plan Isn't Possible
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Page 3:NAS, DAS, Or What?
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Page 4:Fantom Drives G-Force Megadisk MDE1000
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Page 5:SansDigital Mobilestor MS2UTN+
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Page 6:Superbox / Jou Jye ST-2320S/UES
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Page 7:Test System
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Page 8:Benchmarks: RAID 1 Via eSATA And USB
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Page 9:Benchmarks: RAID 0 Via eSATA And USB
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Page 10:Benchmarks: SPAN Via eSATA And USB
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Page 11:Results: Fantom Drive Fast, Sans Digital Limping Behind
SansDigital Mobilestor MS2UTN+
The second candidate in our test is the SansDigital Mobilestor MS2UTN+. This unit can accommodate two 3.5“ drives with a Serial ATA interface. The external housing is supplied without drives and costs somewhere around $90.
The housing is all black and feels very sturdy. The front of the drive trays are made of cast iron, which affects the overall weight. This unit weighs in at approximately 1.7 kg, including the internal power supply. The advantage of this solution is that, when switched off, the housing does not draw any power at all—0 watts. The power consumption in idle is a moderate 18.3 watts, and even the 23 watts required during a RAID 1 rebuild is acceptable.
The Package
The device package includes a USB and eSATA cable, screws for fixing the drives into the slots, a set of installation instructions, a power cable, and two plastic “keys” to open the drive slots, which cannot be locked. (Should these keys be lost, the drive slots can easily be opened using a paper clip.) The scope of delivery also includes an eSATA slot cover that enables you to move an internal SATA connection to the outside of the housing. This allows the Mobilestor MS2UTN+ to be operated on computers that do not have an eSATA interface on the motherboard. As with the G-Force Megadisk MDE1000, the NTI Shadow Backup software is supplied on CD ROM.
Installing The Drives
The drive slots can be opened easily using the supplied keys, and despite the plastic tracks, can be removed easily. SansDigital chose not to include a shelf in the drive slots. In order for the slots to provide some degree of stability even without drives, supports have been added to them—these must be removed before drives can be installed. The housing can handle a total capacity of 2 Terabytes, so the installation of two 1 TB drives is not a problem. The LEDs on the front of the unit inform the user of the status of the system.
Selecting The Operating Mode
As with the Fantom Drives G-Force-Megadisk MDE1000, the operating mode is selected using a rotating button, which must also be set using a small screwdriver. The SansDigital version is not a good solution, however, as the button can be rotated 360 degrees and has no markings. This means that one of two operating modes may have been selected, but you only find out which one you’ve actually selected after you switch on the computer.
In addition to the drive configurations we have seen for the G-Force Megadisk, the Mobilestor MS2UTN+ also has two additional settings: Safe33 and Safe50.
The modes Safe33 and Safe50 are multi-partition RAID combinations. Depending on the setting selected, either 33% or 50% of the available capacity is mirrored over two drives. The remaining capacity is available to the user as an additional logical drive.
- Backing Up Data To A Hard Drive
- The Perfect Backup Plan Isn't Possible
- NAS, DAS, Or What?
- Fantom Drives G-Force Megadisk MDE1000
- SansDigital Mobilestor MS2UTN+
- Superbox / Jou Jye ST-2320S/UES
- Test System
- Benchmarks: RAID 1 Via eSATA And USB
- Benchmarks: RAID 0 Via eSATA And USB
- Benchmarks: SPAN Via eSATA And USB
- Results: Fantom Drive Fast, Sans Digital Limping Behind
Thats just my opinion on it, im sure people who use a lot of firewire products (i only use it for my ext HDDs but) might disagree but the idea of having just one I/O choice to me is better...its like display port for monitors...why oh why didn't they just leave it with DVI/HDMI
It's called "Isochronous transfers". Critical when you're dealing with real-time audio or video. USB doesn't provide that. Also makes bulk data transfer (like backups, for instance) perform more consistently.
USB was never designed for bulk data transfer. That's why it sucks so badly at it. Ever wondered why a 480 Mbit USB2 connection (That's 60 MB/s) can barely achieve between 35 MB/s in real world transfers? That's because the protocol sucks at bulk data transfer. USB was designed for keyboards and mice. To replace low-speed serial ports. Not for high speed bulk data transfer. The USB protocol is inherently deficient in this regard.
Firewire, on the other hand, was designed *specifically* for bulk data transfers. It's obvious when you look at its efficiency at these kinds of tasks. Firewire 400 (that's 50 MB/s) achieves around 42 to 45 MB/s in real world performance. Far FAR more efficient than USB at moving data.
My vote would be for ALL external data storage, audio, and video devices to be firewire only. Make everything else USB.
Firewire does indeed use DMA. That's another advantage it has over USB, at least in terms of performance. Everyone knows from back in the PATA disk days, that DMA transfers are way faster than non-DMA transfers.
But for professional audio/video, there is only one option and that's Firewire. No such thing as pro a/v products that use USB. They just don't exist. So when you say that "companies disable fw interfaces" I suppose it depends on what sort of company you're talking about. Not a production studio that's for sure!!
Again it's hotswap! 4.'something ... http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/OS-Enhancements/HotSwap.shtml it's an amazing tool and it works very well. Solves the problem listed on page 1 about no add/remove icon.
I use Acronis True Image disk utility to make and exact copy when the system half way reboots. Then I turn off the power and swap disks. A few applications like Photoshop can still detect they have been copied. But besides this its a 5 minute replacement if my HD ever gets corrupted.
Otherwise it takes about 4 LONG days to rebuild the system from scratch.
Five minutes vs four days. Go figure!
All laptops should have an eSata port, especially if you've got a 200GB or bigger drive, otherwise you'll be waiting HOURS for a full system backup to complete.
Of course, it all depends on HOW MUCH data you need to get backed up.
Hard drives simply suck at backup, they are slow when it comes to transferring their full capacity and just as useless when it comes to having a backup that is durable/removable. Tapes are still the best way to go, they stream fast but have limited capacity and the drives are very expensive.
Tapes need to come is 1TB capacities, they should cost no more than $100 a pop and the drives should be selling for no more than $600. I would not pay anything more for a tape system for home use. The problem is tapes are still targeted at businesses, which can easily pay the $2000+ price for the best drives.
We've been using Express card or internal sata/esata on most of our macs in house and use them for the direct hard drive connections or even being used as a boot drive on the laptops. So far we noticed better sustained reading and writing performance with ESATA and the increase in the amount of enclosures and drops in prices have helped quite a bit also.
Personally USB 2.0 is only an emergency connector. Only for a last resort. I've been known to take drives out of enclosures just to connect them internally then deal with USB.
If any other connectors get more of a hold on the dv camera/audio equipment then firewire could be rather pointless. They have a nice connector but that's all I can really say in their defence when it comes to esata which is still rather fragile in my opinion.
Either way, it's always nice to see what happens with the newer technologies. Optical connectors on usb3 is intersting, 10Gb ethernet way down the line and who knows, maybe the next firewire will be amazing. Competition is nice for our pocketbooks sometimes.
That said, esata is faster than firewire/400 (though only slightly faster than firewire/800 which most motherboards seem to lack)...
A second motherboard backup strategy is necessary because of Windows anti-copy protection. PLAN to buy a SECOND identical motherboard. Only make your decision to actually buy it when its being discontinued. If the MB goes bad then your main HD backup is only of limited value. But if you put in an identical MB then you should be good to go!
Hard Disks get corrupted and motherboards wear out. Plan ahead for these two major failures. Its just a matter of time.
the last time i need to restore something off the tapes, i needed to restore the server that the tape drives are located on and to do that I needed the tape software which had been lost, spent over 6 hours trying to re-install the backup exec software (alot of time due to it being an ancient machine w\ 10 minute restarts required periodically)
You go "anonymous guy" YOUR KUNG-FU IS GOOD.
The Silent Majority
The Silent Majority
The Silent Majority
And btw esata is better than firewire for hard drives and esata is so easy to install. All you need is the $2.99 bracket to convert the sata port to esata. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812226006
Restoring from an external disk is better than tape - what?!?!
If that external disk is corrupt, I assure you it's much more expensive. Yes, firewire is faster, but is it better? Well, since the extreme majority of systems have USB and not firewire - I'm saying no.
On a production system, data should be shot to a SAN then off to tape backups for storage. How the hell can you irresponsibly recommend a form of consumer storage over another.
Image backups are a good idea too, but we don't keep our data on the same partition as the operating systems, and frankly restoring an image with 1tb of data takes 10 times as long as copying the files over via E-SATA.
We use firewire 800 for uploading from our video camera.
We use E-SATA for backing up our systems for our home and small business.
Our external hard drive bays are always connected with their own power. We simply turn off the power button on the external drive case when not being used, eliminating the need for a "safely remove hardware" button.
We're quite happy with E-SATA for what it does and firewire for what it does, but I'd never use firewire for backing up my data. I've found E-SATA to be much faster and more flexible.
E-SATA is more portable than firewire because it'll plug into any drive that has a SATA controller, which is standard on every computer now, although it won't be hot swapable without E-SATA. Firewire requires a computer with firewire.