Review: Sabio Storage 1TB Dual RAID Drive DM2-PT

While hard drives in computers are constantly increasing in size, it’s becoming more and more important to back up your important files and settings. External hard drives are really useful for a simple backup or to transport big files, like movies or music, but if you really want your files to be safe, or if you have hundreds of gigabytes of data to save, a RAID array is probably a better option.
Sabio Storage’s drive includes two 500GB drives as standard, which can be expanded to a total of 2TB if necessary. The array includes a plethora of connection options, with a MiniUSB port, an eSATA connection and two FireWire 800 ports, allowing you to daisy-chain devices together.

The device does need an external power source, but that’s to be expected when running two drives.

The RAID offers four types of storage out of the box, along with a neat piece of software that helps you set up the one you need. If you need a high-performance drive that will write files quickly, RAID 0 is the way to go. If you want to ensure you never lose files, you’ll be wanting to set it up using RAID 1. For a more simple solution you can use SPAN, which will combine the disks into one large storage space, or JBOD, which will allow you to use each disk individually.

The software included makes it simple to set these up, and the options available are excellent. However, what was really impressive was the performance of the drive. We tested with a number of video and image files, and all were extremely quick. If we’re honest we didn’t notice much difference between RAID 0 and the rest of the set-ups, but that’s because they were all extremely quick. The use of the FireWire 800 port obviously helped with this speed, but with eSATA being (theoretically) even faster, we really are impressed by how this array performs. It’s not cheap, but the options for storage on this array means you can choose to store you data however you like.