Planex PL-35U2BS enclosure will combine two 500GB drives to 1TB

While it isn't the first dual-bay enclosure that we've seen, the Planex PL-35U2BS is among the first SATAII dual-bay (or "dual-core", if you prefer) enclosures that we've spied. It'll support up to 1TB of storage, by taking a pair of 500GB drives and striping 'em with some RAID 0 action, and will connect to the PC of your choice via USB 2.0. Not enough? The aluminum casing claims to keep your hard drives both thermally and aesthetically cool. That's right: twice the coolness.

[sub# @ Nov 6th 2006 7:44AM]

correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't USB the bottle neck here? what good is raid 0?

[strider_mt2k @ Nov 6th 2006 7:50AM]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but by using RAID 0 both drives appear as one drive. In addition, "striping" means that data read/write duties are split between the drives so that they can both work together to increase performance.

I don't know about the USB thing.

[z @ Nov 7th 2006 1:47PM]

yes, USB would be the bottleneck there. RAID 0 puts 1/2 of the file/files you are saving there on the one drive, and the other 1/2 on the other drive. it does lower seek/access times. but if one drive fails, you lose the information on BOTH drives. (recovering 1/2 a file doesn't help much)

[Mark @ Nov 6th 2006 8:16AM]

i may be wrong, but usb2 has a theoretical top speed of 400MB/s, so in practice you are likely to see sustained transfer rates of about 250MB/s with spikes of up to around 350MB/s, so assuming you have a decent usb controller in your system and they've put a decent one in here, it should be plenty fast enough

[Gaz @ Nov 6th 2006 8:19AM]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm hungry.

[christopher @ Nov 6th 2006 8:23AM]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a cheap tower running last year's mobo/CPU combo with Gigabit Ethernet would be able to handle 2TB for about the same price.

-C

[Mike @ Nov 6th 2006 8:28AM]

Corect me if Im worng.

[jptech @ Nov 6th 2006 8:28AM]

SataII speed is 3Gb/s which bottlenecks at the usb2 which is about 480Mb/s (theoretically)

so, the enclosure is for idiots who want a portable storage server.

[Red Shadow @ Nov 6th 2006 10:28AM]

Well, if you want to go any faster than USB, I would go with firewire 800, but that isn't really a well used technology yet. For this, though, I would use firewire anyway.

[alex @ Nov 6th 2006 10:38AM]

I stand corrected.

[Ebzy @ Nov 6th 2006 10:45AM]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that SATAII had a bandwidth of 3GB/s not an actual speed for any individual component. The speed of the drives will be bottlenecked by the USB2.0 by a noticable amount. If this also had an external SATAII and a firewire800 connection then it would really be a good thing.

[James @ Nov 6th 2006 11:52AM]

Oh boy...

Firstly, SATA-II is 3gbps (gigabits per second), not 3GB/s (gigabytes per second). You just made it sound 8 times as fast.

Second, the bottleneck is the drive read speed, not USB. Only WD Raptors can push out SATA-I speed and no conventional HDD is going to do more than that (roll on the mass adoption of flash hard drives).

Thirdly, striping two drives doubles the chance of a failure, although that's probably obvious to you.

The only thing left is to ensure that it doesn't spin down the disks while they aren't being used because that could result in higher latencies when you start using them again.

[Joe Shmoe @ Nov 6th 2006 12:55PM]

You guys all over the place with your USB/SATA stats, James is the only one that's got it completely right. Earlier someone said USB 2.0 was 400MB/s which is way off. You'll be lucky, even with striping if you get more than 38MB/s. Regardless the striping is an unecessary risk unless you really need the performance and if you need performance you should be looking at SCSI/Fibre on the high end and Firewire 800 on the low end.

I've got a USB version of this (link below), which has lasted quite some time now.

http://www.engadget.com/2006/08/23/fantom-drives-releases-roomy-new-triple-interface-g-force-megadi/#comments

[strider_mt2k @ Nov 6th 2006 3:56PM]

Sorry about the whole "correct me if I'm wrong" thing.

Didn't mean to create a monster. I was just trying to be humble.

[Gadget Extremist @ Nov 7th 2006 12:08AM]

No Gigabit, no firewire/1394b, no eSATA? Then I say no to buying one.