• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About
    • Stephen Foskett
      • My Publications
        • Urban Forms in Suburbia: The Rise of the Edge City
      • Storage Magazine Columns
      • Whitepapers
      • Multimedia
      • Speaking Engagements
    • Services
    • Disclosures
  • Categories
    • Apple
    • Ask a Pack Rat
    • Computer History
    • Deals
    • Enterprise storage
    • Events
    • Personal
    • Photography
    • Terabyte home
    • Virtual Storage
  • Guides
    • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • The iPad Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • iPad Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • Toolbox
      • Power Over Ethernet Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix WWN Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix TimeFinder DOS Batch File
    • Linux Logical Volume Manager Walkthrough
  • Calendar

Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Understanding the accumulation of data

You are here: Home / Everything / Personal / Two Dual-Drive Portable RAIDs Reviewed: Akitio and Wiebetech

Two Dual-Drive Portable RAIDs Reviewed: Akitio and Wiebetech

November 10, 2011 By Stephen 5 Comments

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.

You might also want to read these other posts...

  • Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying…
  • GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening (But…
  • Ranting and Raving About the 2018 iPad Pro
  • Liberate Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs and Switches with Tasmota!
  • Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!

Filed Under: Personal, Terabyte home Tagged With: 2.5" drives, Akitio, CRU-dataport, eSATA, FireWire, IDEMA, portable, RAID, Seagate, Toshiba, USB, Wiebetech

Primary Sidebar

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe

Carl Sagan

Subscribe via Email

Subscribe via email and you will receive my latest blog posts in your inbox. No ads or spam, just the same great content you find on my site!
 New posts (daily)
 Where's Stephen? (weekly)

Download My Book


Download my free e-book:
Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts!

Recent Posts

Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From Vroom

November 28, 2020

Powering Rabbits: The Mean Well LRS-350-12 Power Supply

October 18, 2020

Tortoise or Hare? Nvidia Jetson TK1

September 22, 2020

Running Rabbits: More About My Cloud NUCs

September 21, 2020

Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!

September 10, 2020

Remove ROM To Use LSI SAS Cards in HPE Servers

August 23, 2020

Test Your Wi-Fi with iPerf for iOS

July 9, 2020

Liberate Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs and Switches with Tasmota!

May 29, 2020

What You See and What You Get When You Follow Me

May 28, 2019

GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening (But They’re Almost Done)

April 6, 2019

Symbolic Links

    Featured Posts

    The End of Unlimited Data – Part 1: The Buffet

    June 2, 2010

    How Will Cisco Recover From The Consumer Strategy Blunder?

    January 2, 2013

    Thinking About Storage In a New Way, From Cloud to Flash, with Dropbox and Fusion-io

    July 23, 2013

    My Visit to Bletchley Park

    August 3, 2012

    The 2018 iPad Pro is a Beast!

    November 9, 2018

    It’s Time To Speak Out Against Sexism In IT Recruiting

    May 6, 2013

    A Watch Guy’s Review of the Apple Watch

    April 27, 2015

    Begun, the Patent Wars Have

    July 9, 2012

    Deduplication Coming to Primary Storage

    September 16, 2008

    It’s Time To Move Beyond Passwords (Especially On Web Sites)

    January 8, 2016

    Copyright © 2021 ยท Log in