Worth Reading?
+1 [3 votes]
WiebeTech has a RAID array that features a grand total of 2 drives. That’s only enough drives for JBOD, RAID 0, and RAID 1. But, it has several different interfaces for connecting to your computer and its and external enclosure.
You get your choice of eSATA, FireWire 800, FireWire 400, and USB 2.0. You can stuff up to two SATA drives of your choice in capacity in there and then just connect it to your computer and you are off.
The drives appear to be hot swappable with custom drive bays and they are lockable so some idiot can’t just come along and rip one out. However, I would not recommend this system to anyone unless my life depended on it for several reasons, most of them dealing with price. First, there isn’t an Ethernet interface, second, it only holds two drives, and third, you get this mediocre raid system empty, as in no drives included, for $499.95, do you know what you can get for storage space with $500? Lets suffice it to say that with the mediocre features this drive is offering up $500 is way too much for one of these without any drives included.
[wiebetech via Yahoo News]
Bad article. Since when is ethernet suitable for connecting external storage? It may work, but for crying out loud, the thing has three different ways of hooking into it (four if you count FireWire 400 & 800 as two different interfaces), all of which will work easily and quickly without having to tie up a network port.
Also, the $500 buys you an external drive bay with an onboard RAID controller, not storage per se. Complain about what they charge for the drives themselves, if you like; at least that would be pertinent. There really aren’t many people making a product like this; I know because (unlike the author) I’ve looked around. What I’d like to hear is some informed feedback from someone who’s actually used the thing, instead of a jackass who looked at a picture and wrote whatever came into his head.
Do you have any non-Special-Olympians who write reviews on this site? Have them pick one of these things up and write this article over again.