I'm after an external enclosure that can hold 2 Hard drives to be used for data expansion

I'm looking at either eSATA or USB2. USB2 is fine as excessive data transfer rates are not required. What I do require is the unit to be able to Raid 0 both disks to form one large volume. eSATA would be nice for speed, but not essential.

I have been looking at this, but I think it is not JBOD. - Just adds 2 disks to the system.

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Anyone got any experience with these type of devices, oh, and it needs to be Vista/Windows 2008 X64 compatible?

cheers

Raid 0 on an external drive array that presumably you're going to be carrying around?

Bad idea, very very bad idea.

If you're going to moving the discs around then you are increasing the chances of damage to a drive and as such if either drive has any damage you will lose the data on both when striping the data.

If you want it to appear as a single volume that can be achieved without RAID 0, or you could just buy a bigger single disk.

The only real advantage for RAID 0 is a performance increase for writes under certain circumstances, but you have already stated that performance is not an issue. In this case a single disk will be just as fast as the interface will be the limiting factor (USB 2) and also more reliable.

If you wanted RAID, I would get a pair of 500/750GB discs and RAID 1 them myself as that way you have some redundancy.

FWIW unless the enclosure in question has dedicated RAID hardware then you will actually negate any performance advantage RAID 0 might have given you as your CPU has to do some work to stripe the data and track it.

Since that box is a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Discs) it won't have any RAID hardware, so your software would be doing it. You would ideally want an EBOD (Expanded) or SBOD (Switched for te FC fans) with built in RAID hardware to get any advantage.

RAID 1 is pretty much a freebie in the controllers as all it does is do the write to both addresses and also has the advantage that read speeds can increase as there are two sets of independent heads that can read different data areas at the same time.

HTH

You could just span the discs using Storage management, you would see one big disc and it would fill one drive first before using the other.

Or you could use a mount point to mount the 2nd disk to a folder on the first disc.

You could just span the discs using Storage management, you would see one big disc and it would fill one drive first before using the other.

Or you could use a mount point to mount the 2nd disk to a folder on the first disc.

Aye, was what I was getting at, but RAID 0 on a portable disk is data loss asking to happen.