INTRODUCTION

   When solid state drives finally made it to the consumer market roughly 5 years ago no one could deny that they offered superior data transfer speeds compared to regular mechanical drives without at the same time producing noise and heat. However no one also could deny that such solutions had but two large drawbacks and that were their prices (for most people) and limited storage space. So the solution was quite simple for some and so back then Seagate immediately started working on a hybrid drive by marrying a standard 2.5" mechanical drive with a rather large storage capacity and a rather small 2.5" SSD. The idea was to use the HDD section to store everything you threw at the drive and the SSD section to cache the things you used mostly on your daily activities and thus provide you with increased speeds. The result was the Momentus (and later on the updated Momentus XT) hybrid drive which actually did quite well in the end and did produce better results than regular mechanical drives. Other manufacturers also decided to marry a regular HDD with an SSD but they followed a whole different path and so some did so with dual 2.5" internal enclosures (for example RAIDON), others by introducing cache SSDs and Hybrid PCIex models (OCZ) and a few by following the old RAID 0 solution which basically divides all your data evenly on two or more disks for increased performance. RaidSonic just recently jumped on that last wagon with their ICY BOX IB-RD2121StS 2x2.5" to 3.5" HDD/SSD RAID Converter and naturally we just had to check it out.

   RaidSonic Technology GmbH was founded in Hamburg 1999. To realize our future visions and the rising requirements, RaidSonic moved to Ahrensburg (20 min. away from Hamburg) in May 2004.The capacity of our new warehouse, our permanent improving logistic and the expanded technical support lets us look into the future very optimistically. Our vision in a constantly growing IT market is to develop products, which will become your future dreams. Our extensive product portfolio, which we distribute Europe-wide, combines all internal and external solutions for the application of mass storage, for industrial and professional applications as well as for the private sphere, too. Through our all along increasing know-how, good results in research and development and our good cooperation with our long-time customers we could achieve a dynamic growth.

   Unlike other similar solutions the ICY BOX IB-RD2121StS 2x2.5" to 3.5" HDD/SSD RAID Converter actually offers a total of 4 different modes for you to choose from including RAID 0, RAID 1, LARGE and normal (Port Multiplier). As already mentioned RAID 0 mode basically splits your data evenly on two or more drives for increased data transfer speeds by sacrificing data integrity since if one drive fails the entire configuration will too. On the other hand RAID 1 mode may be quite slower since it uses one of the drives to store data and the other to mirror that data but if any of the drives fails then you always have the content on the other drive something which is ideal for critical data. Finally LARGE mode uses two or more drives to create a single large drive (similar as RAID 0 only slower) while normal mode sees both drives independently. Features-wise the RaidSonic solution is quite appealing, at least on paper so let's move forward and see just how good it really is.