CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[WanMan]

All, I just wanted to report on this little docking station for use with 2.5"/3.5" internal hard drives. I bought this product in order to back-up data on disks that were configured in RAID volumes. This is a USB 2.0 connectivity solution and as such is limited to the bandwidth of that specification. I conducted back-ups with this docking station using Western Digital Green 1.5TB disk (WD15EADS).

Ok, so the back up activity and post-testing of the backed up content went well. The USB docking station is treated as such by XP Pro, and the operating system had no problems at all create a single monolithic NTFS primary partition. In fact, I was able to yank naturally-connected SATA disks into the docking station and access contents without any problem.

I paid $40 for this two-bay docking station from Fry's Electronics (B&M). I paid $90/disk for the Green disks from Amazon. After playing around with all of this, I then moved onto the core of my goal: break apart RAID Mirror volumes. The motherboard I am using is an Abit AB9 Pro with on-board Intel Matrix Storage controller. I have three mirrors (2x160GB for boot, 2x500GB for storage, and 2x1TB for additional storage) using the six SATA2 connectors managed by this Intel controller.

I was able to power down, disconnect on of the 500GB disk, drop it into the external docking station, power up and access the contents completely. Sweet! This meant that the Intel Matrix Storage system was 100% transparent between the physical disks and virtual filesystem, and the XP Pro operating system. As such, I can simply disconnect all of the disks I want, delete the RAID volumes I no longer wish to have, and simply boot up.

Hmm, maybe I need to take this docking station to where the Slim is and hook it up and see what can and cannot be read by the PS3 operating environment.

[Spanky Ham]

I am lost, Wan. So, you are moving from a RAID to just using this dock. This is what I was talking about with SSD.

[WanMan]

No, the dock was just a means to break the RAID pairs I had apart without losing data. I just happen to discover the transparency benefit of the Intel Matrix Storage feature on my motherboard. Now, the dock could be used to mobilize 3TB around the house and elsewhere.