The CalDigit S2VR Duo RAID Enclosure

The CalDigit S2VR Duo

The CalDigit S2VR RAID enclosure, rear ¾ view.

CalDigit has clearly targeted their S2VR Duo RAID enclosure to the videophiles in the hardware world, although it obviously has other useful applications as well. Their marketing materials claim that the unit is ideal for single- and multiple-stream 10-bit uncompressed SD (standard definition) video editing, and that's its focus. Of course, the extra speed derived from a RAID array will also speed up just about everything else that accesses the hard disks.

The S2VR Duo sports an attractive, simple, and utilitarian design that would seem to fit in with most modern equipment on a desk. With only two cables - one for power and one for data transfer - the unit is relatively clean of clutter compared to some external RAID enclosures (which require a data transfer cable for each of the installed SATA drives). Speaking of drives, removing and re-attaching hard disks is a very simple affair with the S2VR Duo.

The included PCI-express FASTA card.

The S2VR Duo comes with a PCI express FASTA card with four eSATA ports, which is nice. CalDigit uses a cabling design in the S2VR that they call 'Superlane', which allows more than one drive to be connected via a single eSATA cable. This is one of the chief reasons that the S2VR is relatively clutter free.