Two portable RAID systems arrived at my door. Which would you be more interested in?

RAID is becoming more familiar in the SOHO market, but portable devices using 2.5″ drives remain a novelty. I recently tested two such units, and came away with mixed impressions. Although the ToughTech Duo from CRU-DataPort/Wiebetech sports attractive design, it didn’t perform much better than the homely Akitio Taurus Mini Super-S. And neither is all that portable.

A Tale of Two Drives

CRU-Dataport/Wiebetech ToughTech Duo and Akitio Taurus Mini Super-S

I’ve been intrigued by the industry-wide shift from 3.5″ to 2.5″ hard disk drives, and was curious when this trend would come to consumer devices. CRU-DataPort, also (confusingly) known as Wiebetech, was first to offer up a two-drive portable RAID unit for me to test. Their ToughTech Duo is a rounded elongated brick with a brushed aluminum finish, LCD screen, and big rubbery buttons.

The ToughTech Duo arrived with a pair of 750 GB Seagate drives installed, but it supports many others as well. I swapped in a pair of 500 GB Toshiba drives (sent separately by IDEMA for my use in tests) and was immediately impressed by the ToughTech’s metal drive carriers. They hold the drive firmly and latch in place securely yet require no screws. The overall build quality of the ToughTech Duo is solid, and the interface is easy to use – perhaps too much so, as we will shortly see!

I really appreciated the CRU-Dataport/Wiebetech ToughTech Duo drive carrier

A short time later, Akitio offered me their 2-drive “Taurus Mini Super-S” for testing. A sharp square brick with a rough black finish, the Taurus Mini’s LCD was harder to read and the two tiny control buttons were nearly impossible to press. The drives reside behind a metal door operated with thumbscrews but attach to rough trays with standard Phillips screws. I suppose the drives are secure, but the Taurus isn’t reassuring to work with.

Both the ToughTech Duo and Taurus Mini Super-S include USB 2.0 and eSATA as well as two FireWire 800 ports for daisy-chaining. The omission of USB 3.0 is curious considering how widespread that interface has become on storage devices, but eSATA and FireWire allow these devices to reach their (limited) performance potential.

The CRU-Dataport/Wiebetech packaging is much friendlier

Both devices ship in gaudy boxes that would be right at home on the shelves of MicroCenter or Fry’s, but the Akitio is excessively verbose and nerdy. The packaging, like the overly-long product names, would put off casual computer users, especially Apple buyers looking for simplicity and ease of use. This is disappointing, since any device with FireWire but no USB 3.0 must be aimed at Apple users!

Configuring RAID

Both drives allow the user to switch between RAID 1 (mirroring) and RAID 0 (striping, with no data protection) using the panel buttons. But since this operation is destructive to the data stored, this might not be all that useful. Most users will likely select one or the other and leave it that way, a blessing given the microscopic buttons on the Akitio.

An average user is likely to leave the drive plugged in when performing RAID changes, leading to disastrous results with the Wiebetech drive. The Akitio resets itself when RAID levels are changed, but the Wiebetech (curiously) does not. I was able to continue writing and reading data after switching to RAID 1, but a reboot destroyed the format and the data. I made the company aware of this issue and they assured me it would be corrected. But I haven’t seen a fix yet, and it’s been a few months. The fact that the documentation instructs users to unplug the drive on RAID changes isn’t reassuring: Few buyers will actually read and follow these instructions.

Interestingly, both devices use the same on-disk format for both RAID 0 and 1. I was able to pull the drives from one and use them in the other with no apparent issues. Wiebetech assured me that their RAID 1 format simply writes all data to both drives. I was able to confirm that this was the case, with a removed RAID 1 drive remaining readable using a direct SATA connection.

Usability Concerns

There's a lot of stuff in the Akitio Taurus Mini Super-S box!

Although both devices are admirably small, they are not really all that compact. Carrying either drive (along with its power brick) in my backpack was definitely noticeable both in bulk and weight. And these are surprisingly heavy devices – each weighs more than my 2011 MacBook Pro!

Both devices get fairly hot under heavy use as well, and neither sports a fan. The Akitio has what looks like a heatsink along the bottom, but I didn’t notice that the rest of the body stayed cooler. And the Wiebetech got downright hot, even setting off its internal temperature alarm during benchmarking! This was an isolated occurrence, however, and I was unable to cause it to overheat again.

It is way too easy to erase all data on the ToughTech Duo by changing RAID levels with the big, friendly buttons

The ease of switching RAID modes is disturbing to me, since this destroys all data on the drives even without considering the Wiebetech’s data loss-inducing bug. But the LCD and buttons are fairly useless apart from this rare operation.

Performance and Compatibility

I tested both devices with the same Toshiba 500 GB drives to gauge their controller performance, but the Seagate drives shipped with the CRU-Dataport/Wiebetech device are much quicker overall.

Sequential read performance with RAID 0 pushes the limits of FireWire at about 83 MB/s, with RAID 1 only slightly behind

Sequential write performance isn't as good, with both units lagging when using RAID 1. Although equal in performance with RAID 0, the Wiebetech lagged severely in RAID 1 performance

Random read performance is nicely homogenous, with both drives topping out around 45 MB/s

Random writes were a different story, with the Akitio and Wiebetech close together for both RAID 0 and 1, but each demonstrating superiority in a different area. The Akitio just kept accelerating as I/O's got larger with RAID 1, while the Wiebetech pulled ahead with RAID 0. Oddly, RAID 0 writes lagged behind RAID 1 on the whole.

Wiebetech's bundled Seagate drives easily outperformed the Toshibas is random benchmarks, nearly doubling random write throughput

But the Toshiba drives were faster in sequential operations, with the Seagates lagging well behind

Stephen’s Stance

I often receive storage devices for review, but it’s unusual that two such similar ones arrive at once. After giving each a fair amount of testing and use, I come away unimpressed. The Akitio looks and feels like the sort of no-name OEM device often overlooked by buyers, while the slickly-designed Wiebetech exhibited disconcerting bugs. Both have confusing names and packaging as well. If I had to pick one, it would be the CRU-Dataport/Wiebetech ToughTech Duo, thanks to its more compact size and user-friendly drive sleds. Note that the Akitio appears to be cheaper at retail, but this is due to the cost of the hard disk drives in the Wiebetech/CRU-Dataport device.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Two Dual-Drive Portable RAIDs Reviewed: Akitio and Wiebetech
This post was categorized as Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Not For Laptops

As we’ve discussed before, modern laptops require thin 9.5 mm drives, which usually translates into two-platter units. This new WD Scorpio Blue is a three-platter, 12.5 mm design. So although this drive will certainly see lots of use in the hot mobile external drive market, we will not likely start seeing 1 TB laptops quite yet.

Note that Seagate rolled out a 640 GB FreeAgent Go USB drive last month. Although the company still hasn’t officially revealed the drive mechanism inside this mobile drive, we have surmised that it uses the 9.5 mm laptop-friendly two-platter design with 333 GB per platter. The new WD unit uses the same platter size and density, taking more wind out of Western Digital’s sails.

Shaking Up External Storage

But since both the initial WD and Seagate drives are aimed at the portable USB unit market rather than landing inside laptops, WD’s announcement of both 1 TB and 750 GB sizes should give it a nice differentiator on the shelves of retail stores.

Seagate has relied on 9.5 mm drives for quite a while, so it is unlikely to be able to match WD’s capacity for quite some time. We expect Hitachi GST and Samsung to quickly match WD’s capacity point with 3-platter 12.5 mm units, as they have done in the past, enabling OEMs like Iomega and LaCie to meet WD’s challenge. It remains to be seen if Seagate and Toshiba will ship 3-platter drive units to compete or wait until they can reach 1 TB with two-platter drives.

Enterprise Implications?

All of this talk of increased capacity inevitably leads to the question of whether these units will find their way into data centers and enterprise storage systems. At this point, Western Digital has not been very successful in the enterprise space, so this particular drive is unlikely to play there, either. But a potential 1 TB Hitachi GST response could indeed be used in enterprise storage.

More interesting is the impact that these 333 GB platters will have. Even if 1 TB drives don’t arrive in enterprise storage units today, this new areal density mark is likely to trickle up to this market. With HP announcing that they would shift to the 2.5 inch form factor for all of their enterprise storage products over the next few years, derivative high-capacity drives from other manufacturers could be the first real entry in the enterprise space.

Conclusion

So although this announcement will not shake the laptop or enterprise markets, it does promise to inject new energy into the portable external drive segment, likely reducing prices for existing products as well. After all, with a 1 TB drive sitting on the shelf, who would want to buy a 250 GB drive even at half the price?

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | WD’s 1 TB Laptop Drive? Not Quite!
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

While you can already buy an amazing miniature RAID array that fits in a 5.25″ drive bay, and 2.5″ drives are seeing widespread use in blades and other compact servers, there isn’t much noise among enterprise array makers about the topic. About the only enterprise makers are Infortrend, ProStor, and HP.

Infortrend trumpeted the “world’s first external SFF array” in October, so at least they were pretty sure no one else sells one. But HP might beg to differ – their MSA70 shipped at the end of last year, supporting up to 25 SFF drives in 2U. They also apparently offer a 20-drive SFF shelf for other MSA systems, but I haven’t seen one.

Finally there’s ProStor with their cool RDX removable disk cartridges for backup. I’d love to see the TCO for these, but there are probably some enterprise users out there.

Like Chris, though, I’ve never seen these things outside a trade show. Is anyone using them? Or are we right in supposing that the weight, power, and heat issues associated with multiplying drive spindles offsets their performance advantages?

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Where Are the Ultra-Dense Arrays?
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.