Newer Technology Guardian MAXimus RAID-1 [MIRROR] eSATA/FW800/400+USB 2.0 Enclosure Kit for 2 x HDD Great if nothing fails on you, or if you want to swap drives – Stephen Sherrard – Seattle, WA USA
I have 8 of these enclosures that I bought over the course of the last couple years for use in my music and video production studio. I need a LOT of safe, redundant backup, and these seemed to fit the bill with automatic mirrored RAID, so if one drive failed, your data would not be lost.
I bought the empty enclosures and filled them with my own hard drives that I bought separately from another company. At first I just got a couple of enclosures and was going to swap out new drives when I filled up the current ones, and keep them all labeled so I could swap them back in as needed to restore old files.
So, just recently, I tried to reorganize and consolidate some of my backup sets, and bought many new enclosures so I wouldn’t need to swap drives around so often (too many screws, and no way to quick swap drives). The first thing I found out in an unfortunate way is that newer models of these enclosures are not compatible with older versions, as the firmware is different. When I put old backup drive sets into a new enclosure, the new enclosure decided to wipe the drive index and prepare the drive as a new non-partitioned drive, as if I put new blank drives in there. So, in Windows no drives showed up until I went into disk management, where it showed a new drive with no volumes/partitions.
At least the customer service was helpful with this, and I was able to recover the data on that set of drives by plugging one of the drives into a regular drive connector and then using partition recovery software to detect and restore the old partition on the drive.
So, first lesson learned! DO NOT plan on swapping out drives on a regular basis unless you use the same enclosure each time and make sure the drives are hooked up to the same exact drive connectors each time!
I can live with that, but then just two days ago I turned on the enclosure I use in my office to back up my office computer, and I got the red light for the second drive indicating it had failed, and the blinking rebuild light and the drive one light was also flashing. Maybe I let it sit there too long, but when I took out the second drive and then reconnected the enclosure, I was not able to copy all the files from the first drive to my computer… they were huge Acronis backup drive images, and one of the files for one of my drives was corrupted and wouldn’t copy or read. Total loss there, but thankfully it’s a relatively new office computer and was just a safety copy of current drive state, so nothing was really lost. I took that first drive out and hooked it up directly to the computer and reformatted it and did a sector by sector scan… no bad sectors found!! So, somehow this Guardian Maximus enclosure that is supposed to protect my data with redundant copies of my data corrupted the “good” drive when the other drive failed. The bad drive did actually fail totally with too many bad sectors to recover, but the “good” drive tested out fine.
So, now I’m left with very little confidence in my backup sets and am looking at other options… including just taking the drives out and making two identical copies myself onto the drives and storing them separately until needed, or possibly getting a Blu-Ray burner and using those as another backup.
rvbcave “Loved it until…” – C. Brown – St. Augustine, Fl. United States
I absolutely loved this unit until about 6 months after the warranty expired it died on me. I hooked the drives up to alternate power and the drive worked through the connections. I didn’t pay $$$ to have to rig this drive up. Up until the RAID unit failed (not the drives) I would have given it 5 stars. Now it gets 1.
: Newer Technology Guardian MAXimus RAID-1 [MIRROR] External eSATA/FireWire 800/400+USB 2.0 Dual Hard Drive Enclosure Kit. Supports 2 x SATA HDDs! Quad Interface, Oxford 936 SATA chipset. Includes software bundle, all cables, 1 year warranty.
Newer Technology Guardian MAXimus RAID-1 [MIRROR] eSATA/FW800/400+USB 2.0 Enclosure Kit for 2 x HDD
Tags: Enclosure, eSATAFW800400USB, Guardian, MAXimus, MIRROR, RAID1, Technology