Steve Nets

RAID Hard Drive Enclosures – When one Hard Drive is not enough

With the vast amunt of data we are all collecting from music files, media files, pictures etc there is a growing need for a comprehensive back up solution. DUAL Bay RAID enclosures offer this and more besides.

If you’ve got a large amount of data to back up or store then rather than looking at a standard Hard Drive Enclosure into which you install one Hard Drive you could consider a Dual Bay RAID Enclosure.

DUAL Bay enclosures as the name suggests support two separate Hard Disk Drives, which significantly increases the amount of data you can save externally. But Dual BAY RAID Enclosures go one step further an provide you with a number of additional options:

If you set up these enclosure to support RAID 0 then both of the installed Hard Disk Drives will show up as one large “virtual” drive. So if you install say two separate 1TB SATA Hard Drives you’ll end up with a “virtual” drive of 2TB.

Alternatively if you set up both installed Hard Disk Drives to utilize RAID 1 (Mirroring Mode) then any data saved to the Drives in the enclosure will automatically be mirrored to the 2nd drive. In effect one of the hard drives in the enclosures becomes the primary back up and the other becomes the secondary back up. Data copied or “mirrored” to the secondary back up is copied automatically.

If you have critical data then using a Dual Bay Enclosure with RAID 1 is a sensible option as it give you a real “belt and braces” approach to the back up of your data.

RAID Hard Drive Enclosures illustrate just how far these products have come over the years and reflect how much data we are all now storing or should be storing and backing up on a regular basis.

Whilst there are complete Dual Drive and RAID enclosures already pre-packaged on the market with the hard drives pre-installed an enclosure provides a much more cost effective solution. Once the preserve of businesses Dual Bay Raid enclosures are now making their way into the home. As more people save digital photos, music, family films and movies to their PC this trend is only set to increase. 

When shopping for RAID enclosures bear in mind that most of them will only support the newer, faster SATA Hard Disks Drives and not IDE, ATA or PATA Hard Drives

Article Tags: Hard Drive Enclosures, Hard Drive, Drive Enclosures, Hard Disk, Raid Enclosures, Hard Drives

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