| Value |  4 | | Performance | 4 | | Ease of Use |  3.5 | | Overall Satisfaction | 4 |
| |
1 of 1 customers found this review helpful.
4 of 5 Good device Friday, May 16, 2008
A Customer from Elkhart, Indiana
We have two of these in use now at our agency. They were very easy to configure and quite dependable. However, they do not play well at all with USB 1.0 devices (which we still have quite a few of), and the management software CD that was included with them came blank. We had to download the software from the web. Other than these two items, we have been quite pleased with them. Was this review helpful?  
3 of 5 RAID Storage System Tuesday, March 25, 2008
ernest_lane2001@yahoo.com from huntington beach, CA
The fan is very noisy. Thus far, it is ease to get it connected to the PC system. Was this review helpful?
1 of 1 customers found this review helpful.
5 of 5 Great Drive Wednesday, January 02, 2008
A Customer from Laguna Hill, CA
It is a great drive. Love the eSATA support. With eSATA this drive is very fast - don't expect much speed if using USB as USB is limited. It was easy to setup, just be sure you turn on eSATA support in the BIOS if the drive is not seen at first in My Computer. The only drawback is the lack of backup software. My next drive will be the 2 TB version. Was this review helpful?
5 of 5 customers found this review helpful.
4 of 5 Not quite plug and play Friday, December 28, 2007
A Customer from Shelton, CT
Installing this device is not quite plug and play. The drive works in one of 2 modes; USB or eSATA. If you choose to use USB, you will have to install a driver (57xx Steelvine) before the USB recognizes the device. Once installed, you need to determine how you want to configure the RAID controller before the device is seen by Windows. There are several options.
Using the Steelvine Manager you choose a storage policy. For example, you can choose to have the device configured a one large drive (1TB no data protection), RAID0 (Striping across both drives 500Gb no data protection but fast I/O), RAID 1 Mirror (500GB complete protection), or a combination of RAID 0 and 1.
The included pdf manual is very good at explaining the steps involved. Once you've decided how you want the RAID configured, the Manager configures the drives and verifies the result. I choose RAID 1. The configure / verify step took over 3 hours to complete.
After a reboot, the system will 'see' the drive, but it now needs to be partitioned and formatted using Window Disk Management tools. Once that step is completed, the device is ready to use.
I initially used it via USB 2.0 via a dedicated port on my Dell Precision 380 workstation. However, I found the device too slow for my needs. I purchased a eSATA card capable of 3Gbit transfers and now the device screams! It is very fast via eSATA. Also, using eSATA the service mentioned at the beginning of this review is no longer needed. I changed the startup from Automatic to M |
