Computing on Demand PC News & Reviews
Eagle is a company that I am fast becoming a fan of. They are consistently releasing practical affordable solutions to some of the needs I have been faced with lately. I can already hear it… can you? It’s saying, what sets this enclosure apart from the THOUSANDS of others out there? Simple, its made by Eagle… AND, it is DUAL BAY!
Overview
It’s all about multitasking performance. This unique dual bay enclosure provides independent access to two different drives! Minimize desktop clutter and reclaim your valuable work space. No other enclosure offers the efficiency of this dual drive tool less design. Just snap in your hard drives and they are ready to use. Great for quick drive copies (A to B) or from PC to both drives.
Single drive external enclosures are becoming more a necessity than a convenience these days. As the features become standard across manufacturers, the only thing that sets them apart is if they think of them first. Eagle gave us the quick release external enclosure (ET-CS1000MSU2-BK) early in the game and decided that leaving good enough isn’t alone.
While the ET-CS1000MSU2-BK sported a similar single design, Eagle chose to use a push pin style key for opening the enclosure door. The idea was sound, but I lost mine quickly and have since replaced it with an unbent paperclip. The ET-CSMDSU2-BK, however, uses a much smarter system for drive removal… a button; one for each bay. The buttons are placed at the top of the enclosure and when pressed, release the tray for the drive; each tray is independent, however, I wouldn’t have opposed using something a little more sturdy than plastic here as the rest of the enclosure does Joining the buttons at the top is a power LED and activity indicator. They are bright enough to notice from across your desk.
The rear of the unit is where Eagle gives us the goodies. Outside of the standard USB connection and power switch, there are two little goodies. First goodie is a cooling fan and the second… a switch. The fan is a bit obnoxious as it makes a high pitched noise that sounds like a ringing in your ear, yet it does an adequate job of cooling your drives. Unless you feel like making breakfast (over easy or sunny side up?) on your external enclosure, I wouldn’t mess with it too much. The second goodie, the switch remember?, changes the unit from two independent disks to a unit that utilizes JBOD (just a bunch of disks).
Concatenation or Spanning of disks is not one of the numbered RAID levels, but it is a popular method for combining multiple physical disk drives into a single virtual disk. It provides no data redundancy. As the name implies, disks are merely concatenated together, end to beginning, so they appear to be a single large disk.
Concatenation may be thought of as the inverse of partitioning. Whereas partitioning takes one physical drive and creates two or more logical drives, concatenation uses two or more physical drives to create one logical drive.
In that it consists of an array of independent disks, it can be thought of as a distant relative of RAID. Concatenation is sometimes used to turn several odd-sized drives into one larger useful drive, which cannot be done with RAID 0. For example, JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) could combine 3 GB, 15 GB, 5.5 GB, and 12 GB drives into a logical drive at 35.5 GB, which is often more useful than the individual drives separately.
-Wikipedia
JBOD doesn’t offer any performance increases over other RAID methods, too bad they couldn’t include striping or mirroring within the enclosure. That would most likely cost consumers more, but offering it as an option would be nice.
