A cagey device that protects your data

The ARAID 2000 is a two-drive RAID enclosure for either SATA or PATA drives that occupies two 5.25-inch internal bays in your PC. Each drive is housed within a lockable, removable tray. With the drives screwed into the trays, you insert the trays into the enclosure and lock each shut with the turn of a key. You’ll need the right type of trays for your drives—they’re available in both parallel ATA and Serial ATA formats—and the entire enclosure connects to your PC using a single PATA or SATA cable. In operation, it functions like a hot-swappable RAID 1 array that’s always ready for action.

Here’s how it works: You put your bootable drive in the top bay, then connect the enclosure to your PC using either a PATA or SATA cable. Upon boot, the PC recognizes your hard drive as if it were directly connected to the mobo. Once the system is up and running, you simply insert the second drive into the bottom tray and it begins to copy everything from the first drive. Once the copying operation is complete (it transfers about 30GB an hour), you have a fully functioning mirrored RAID 1 array. This is really, really cool—using a typical RAID controller, you’d have to wipe both drives and start over from scratch to set up a RAID 1 array. Alternatively, you can run the unit in “single drive” mode, and Accordance tells us that RAID 0 support will also be offered via a firmware update by the time you read this.

The only major downside to the ARAID 2000 is noise. The internal 70mm fan is way too loud. It’s louder than a CPU cooler, which is ridiculous. Also, the SATA host adapter degrades performance. In HD Tach, we saw average seek times on our test drive drop from 13.2ms to 18.4ms when run from the ARAID. Read times also dipped a smidge from a maximum average of 52.3MB/s to 49MB/s. Performance felt the same, but benchmarks showed otherwise.

Despite these two flaws, there’s not much to really criticize here. The ARAID delivers on all its promises and is a slick and easy way to add data redundancy to your current rig, if you can stomach the price tag. —Josh Norem

+ RAID 1: Easy to use; best way to add RAID 1 to your system.
- Police Raid: Fan is too loud; slightly diminished performance.

Month Reviewed: June 2005
Verdict: 8
URL: www.accordancesystems.com