macnn
08/02/2008, 12:10pm, EDT
Saturday, August 2nd
Sans Digital introduces simple RAID storage solution
Sans Digital has introduced a new direct attached storage enclosure, the TowerRAID TS2UT. The TS2UT is a tray-less, 2-bay storage tower with RAID capabilities. The tray-less feature is designed for fast installation and access of hard drives: each hard drive can easily be installed or removed by opening the front plate handle. A turn-lock located at the front of each handle allows the drives to be secured without the need of screws or other tools. In addition to easy hard drive access, the TS2UT offers users four different RAID modes, FAST (RAID 0), SAFE (RAID 1), JBOD (individual drive access), and BID (spanning). The different RAID modes are selectable by a switch located on the front panel.
The TS2UT supports the latest 1TB hard drive and is capable of up to 2TB total in storage capacity. It also supports both USB 2.0 and eSATA interfaces under Windows, Linux and Mac.
The TowerSTOR TS2UT is available now and sells for $120, with no included drives or controller cards. Other options with disks and controller cards are also available at an added cost.
Filed under: peripherals, upgrades/storage, accessories
Other story tags: hard drive, RAID
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Confusing
The fourth mode is "BIG", not "BID" (just look at the picture). Also, the description of the various modes is a little confusing. The descriptions for RAID 0 and RAID 1 make sense, but describing JBOD as "individual drive access" doesn't. JBOD (as the industry defines it) joins multiple drives together and makes them appear as one large drive, so you lose individual drive access. In fact, JBOD and spanning are pretty much synonymous, but according to the article, the BIG mode is the spanning mode.I suspect that what Sans is calling "JBOD" isn't really spanning at all - the installed drives show up as separate drives on your desktop. Their BIG mode is what the rest of the industry calls "JBOD" (spanning a single virtual drive across multiple physical drives).