To really get JBOD working, I sourced a couple of mis-matched Western Digital drives to play around with. The bottom drive is a 500GB model and the other one is a 1TB drive. Just to think, a few years ago this kind of setup (>1TB) external would have cost a pretty penny.

When I first plugged it in I didn't see the drives in Windows manager. I then remembered I have been using the system for some other work via VMware. It turned out my Ubuntu 7.10 VMware system had grabbed the drives and wanted to use them as their own. I ejected the disks and turned off VMware and I was back in business.

With the drives in JBOD, it netted me about 1397.27GB. That works out to about 174 hours of HD TV record with BeyondTV.

Using the RAID 0 option, it gives you two drives connected via a single USB cable.

To get some benchmarks done, I ran the physical disks test with SiSoftware Sandra. The results came out on par with all of the other external devices I have tested. Constant use did not cause any random disconnects or dropped drives.

Overall, the device is useful to be able to double the hard drives used in enclosures and cutting down on the number of power bricks you need to power everything. The onboard JBOD/RAID is a nice option for those looking to keep the number of physical disk down and for backing up of large media files. Installation can take a few moments if this is your first forray into external drive setup.

The only gripe is the close proximity of the power cables to the cooling fan. With so much going on in front of the fan, it can cut down on the cooling that's supposed go over your hard drives.

Thanks to Eagle Tech for sending over this sample!