Cavalry Storage CADA-SA2-H Series 1 TB USB / eSATA 2-bay RAID Personal Disk Array CADA001SA2-H

List Price: $214.99 Discount Price: $202.99

Features:

• USB 2.0 (USB 1.1 backwards compatible) and eSATA interface
• Plug and play for Windows 2000 and newer (pre-formatted to NTFS), preconfigured to RAID 1 (mirrored, total usable capacity is halved in RAID 1)
• Configurable to RAID 0, 0+1 and 1
• Unit Includes - One (1) year manufacturer's warranty, two (2) 500 GB 3.5-inch hard drives installed in a dual bay enclosure with built-in fan, USB cable, eSATA cable, eSATA bracket, AC adapter, Resources CD and Quick Start Guide
• System Requirements - Available USB port or eSATA port, Mac OS 9.x or newer, Windows 98SE / Me / 2000 / XP / Vista

Customer Reviews:

Caution! Description incorrect. [Posted on 2008-07-29]
Just a warning that the product description is wrong. It arrived configured for RAID 0, which provides no redundancy. One the big selling points for me was the redundant disks and although the product description says it will ship with RAID 1 that is not correct.

Also, the included utility isn't very intuitive and required a lot of playing around with in order to get the unit properly configured for RAID 1. The manuals are poorly written and incorrect on many details.

I would only order this drive unit if you are very familiar with the Disk Management suite built into Windows.

EDIT: It appears that this drive will not function if another external USB drive is connected to the same system. Drive will come online and go offline repeatedly. Can't recommend at all. Zero stars.

Good Value but on the noisy side [Posted on 2008-09-19]
I use this drive in Raid 1 for my digital photos. The drive is a good value for this purpose.

If you have a spare SATA port in your computer, this drive comes with all stuff necessary to hook it up in the esata configuration, and you don't have to buy anything else. However its fan is fairly loud all the time, even if the computer itself is turned off. I find it a little annoying at times. This is the only reason I didn't rate it with 5 stars.

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