On Wednesday, a thought popped into my head: “You need to make use of the second Seagate 200Gb hard drive you have sitting in the garage doing nothing”. I have been looking around for one of these enclosures for quite some time now, but for the price most retailers had them listed, I chose to pass each time.

It was my lucky day, I found it on special for $149 with $17 shipping, so out came the credit card and that was that. The enclosure arrived this morning at work, so I painfully had to wait the day out to make use of it. What does the enclosure feature?

Capacity: Two 3.5″ SATA I / SATA II Hard Drives.
Data Transfer: FireWire 400: Up to 400Mb/s, FireWire 800: Up to 800Mb/s and USB 2.0: Up to 480Mb/s.
Operating Modes: JBOD, Raid 0 or single drives.
Chipset: Oxford 924DSB.

Setup was pretty simple and took probably 10 minutes at most. I have chosen to use the hard drives in Raid 0, striping mode. The enclosure is connected to my iMac using FireWire 800. The improved transfer speeds are definitely noticeable, I transferred over 59Gb of data in 17 minutes – which for me, is quite impressive.

The only minor issue I see if the fan at the rear of the enclosure, which does have a rather elevated ‘hum’ probably because it runs at 6000rpm or so. I’ll be looking at getting a quieter replacement in the coming days. In closing, if you are after a stylish, dual bay hard drive enclosure – don’t pass this one up.