i just got the 3500MGB-RAID Galaxy Series. it’s the first external usb/firewire 2 drive raid enclosure that i’ve seen. i dropped my last hard drive enclosure and the hard drive immediately died. lesson learned there, don’t drop spinning hard drives.

i’ve been in the market to add some my storage space to my home system. i’ve looked at building a file server and then realized that all of the drives that i thought i had lying around were SATA drives, not IDE. who uses IDE still, anyway, right? well, it turns out that the old, old computer i built uses IDE drives. oops.

i popped two drives in the enclosure, set up the RAID setting via a couple of dip switches, turned the thing on, and formatted the drives. it works as advertised and performance seems good. i’ll have to do some more work on it before i can see how well it performs, but it had no problems with me copying stuff to the drive while streaming out video at the same time, which is probably about as hard as i would task it.