DataWhale 2 Bay RAID System

As the performance tests show, the DataWhale 2 Bay RAID system is quite a decent performer. The unit retails at US$154.95 which is reasonable for what’s on offer. It incorporates a number of RAID features catering to a popular requirement for users, and also supports the new eSATA II standard for high speed data transfer.

Hard drive enclosures certainly have come a long way and Onnto Corporation is moving in the right direction. If you’re looking for something more than a simple hard drive enclosure the DataWhale 2 Bay RAID system is the next step up. If you want optimum performance you can set the unit on RAID 0 or for best redundancy the unit also supports RAID 1 mirroring.

The DataWhale also supports hot swap capability so if one of the drives gets corrupted in MIRROR RAID mode you can take out the drive while the system is on and simply replace with a new drive. For testing purposes we did remove one of the drives after configuring the DataWhale in Mirror Mode, and then put another similar capacity drive in it. The DataWhale immediately started setting up the newly inserted drive automatically. Furthermore you do not need to have the DataWhale connected to the PC for the restoration of the drive to work. Even while disconnected as long as the DataWhale is kept turned on, the drive will be restored to match the 1st drive. In the event you turn off the DataWhale while the restoration is taking place, the progress will be stored in the units’ memory and will resume soon after it’s turned back on. This is very impressive and very good news when storing critical information on the DataWhale 2 Bay system.

The Restoration will take from a few minutes to sometimes over one and a half hours depending on how much data needs to be restored. Our drive had 16GB of data and restoration took 1 hour and 40 minutes.

The DataWhale 2 Bay RAID system is a very versatile little device and users will find it very handy. It’s small enough to be highly portable and incorporates really good features that users will benefit from. Since eSATA II is also supported you will not see any lag while copy to and from the DataWhale. The drives perform just like a conventional internal hard drive so even watching movies, songs or playing games stored on the DataWhale will not show any lag.

One of the main problems users might have at the moment is getting their hands on one of these units as it doesn’t seem to be widely available. This should soon change however as this is a very new product from Onnto Corporation and once it reaches all their distributors around the globe more and more retailers should carry them.

We have tried to look for any drawbacks of the unit but honestly can’t really find anything significant to mention here. Maybe something Onnto Corporation could implement in any future releases is some kind of system temperature monitoring unit just to make sure everything is running smoothly. Overall we are really impressed with the DataWhale 2 Bay RAID system and if opting for a full blown NAS system is beyond what’s required then going for one of these devices seem to be the next best logical choice.