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External Dual-Bay enclosure for 2.5inch HDD

C

Chparigi

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 25, 2013
106
12
Switzerland, Europe
Hi everyone

I have two spare identical 2,5" SSD hard drives, and I decided that I wanted to put them in a external Raid enclosure that has usb3.0, and use it with Raid0, so that I potentially can double the transfer speeds.

I remembering stumbling upon a cabinet on Amazon.co.uk, but the choices I have are very limited. I've found an enclosure from OWC on macsales.com, but since i live in Europe, the shipping would be around 30$ bucks, and that's an awful lot I think.

Do you have any recommendations/ideas?
 
js81

js81

macrumors 65816
Dec 31, 2008
1,199
16
KY
Chparigi said:
Hi everyone

I have two spare identical 2,5" SSD hard drives, and I decided that I wanted to put them in a external Raid enclosure that has usb3.0, and use it with Raid0, so that I potentially can double the transfer speeds.

I remembering stumbling upon a cabinet on Amazon.co.uk, but the choices I have are very limited. I've found an enclosure from OWC on macsales.com, but since i live in Europe, the shipping would be around 30$ bucks, and that's an awful lot I think.

Do you have any recommendations/ideas?
Click to expand...

Dual 2.5's are few and far between, unfortunately. I was going to recommend the OWC - it's quite nice. I've owned a couple and both worked great, though mine was USB 2 with Firewire 800.
 
nightmars

nightmars

macrumors member
Sep 21, 2010
93
16
Germany
I think in general that's a great idea (Since I used to absolutely love Raid0 Computers back in my gaming days). But I doubt that you'll see a real positive increase in performance when raiding 2 SSDs in a USB enclosure. Even if they are 6G SSDs with up to 550MBs EACH, I doubt you'll actually top the 300 MBps limit- Not even close to the "theoretical" 1100MBps raided.

Here are some real-word-tests: (Just scroll down to where they use the SSDs and compare USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt...

http://www.macworld.com/article/2039427/how-fast-is-usb-3-0-really-.html

As the above poster already mentioned, dual 2,5" enclosures are really rare. But if you're really in the need for a portable external dual-sytem, why don't just get a decent (and cheaper) dual 3,5" and use your SSDs with some 3,5"adapter-sleds? If you are looking for some permanent storage you might even take a look at (very energy efficient) 2,5" servers. (See my sig for an example)
 
Last edited:
C

Chparigi

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 25, 2013
106
12
Switzerland, Europe
Thank you alle for the replies!

nightmars said:
I think in general that's a great idea (Since I used to absolutely love Raid0 Computers back in my gaming days). But I doubt that you'll see a real positive increase in performance when raiding 2 SSDs in a USB enclosure. Even if they are 6G SSDs with up to 550MBs EACH, I doubt you'll actually top the 300 MBps limit- Not even close to the "theoretical" 1100MBps raided.

Here are some real-word-tests: (Just scroll down to where they use the SSDs and compare USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt...

http://www.macworld.com/article/2039427/how-fast-is-usb-3-0-really-.html

As the above poster already mentioned, dual 2,5" enclosures are really rare. But if you're really in the need for a portable external dual-sytem, why don't just get a decent (and cheaper) dual 3,5" and use your SSDs with some 3,5"adapter-sleds? If you are looking for some permanent storage you might even take a look at (very energy efficient) 2,5" servers. (See my sig for an example)
Click to expand...

The SSD's I've got are only intel 320, so they're write speeds only are about 130 mb/s. So i don't think that i'll get near the 300mbps limit :)

But it seems like it's only the OWC to go for, if i want to go Raid. Another cool thing about the OWC was, that it had firewire support, which would be nice for my Mac mini 2011.

Going for a network HDD might seem a bit overkill for me, and i already have a 4tb NAS from Seagate.

But is there any way that there might be an enclosure for 2.5 Inch HDD's that have thunderbolt? Raid or not?
 
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