Dual-drive external USB storage for £20 - really?
Posted on 24th Mar 2010 at 11:46 by Richard Swinburne with 21 comments
Everyone needs a bit of extra storage, right? For those who can't afford expensive RAID arrays or want something more portable than just throwing in another internal hard drive, USB drives are always accessible.
While the Tsunami Ultimate II 3500 might look like any other USB drive caddy out there it does have one appealing hook: it's the cheapest dual-disk drive caddy on the market. At just £21, Tsunami assures us we'll find nothing cheaper - and as far as we can tell, it is right.
Click to enlarge
That said, being the cheapest doesn't always mean worth buying, and while we didn't expect much for an Adam Smith and some change, the Tsunami does in fact have a few interesting features.
Click to enlarge
The box says it sports both RAID 0/1 or JBOD for two SATA hard drives, however neither setting really worked like we expected. There's a strange switch on the back that selects between "big" and "JBOD" yet we couldn't actually find how to select either RAID mode. Instead of the JBOD setting morphing all the drives into one big one, it just shows them both independently - and they work separately as intended. Both can even be written to/read from at the same time, although you'll sacrifice performance because of the limited bandwidth USB 2 provides. There's no eSATA or USB 3 support, but to expect that for £20 would be unrealistic.
Click to enlarge
The outer shell is a lovely brushed aluminium finish, and in the box there's even a couple of replacement front and back covers in case you fancy something flashier than black!
Click to enlarge
It does have a fan in the back, but it's not too noisy - with a 7,200RPM drive inside you'll probably notice vibration more, especially given that the internal steel shell is directly screwed into the outer aluminium tube, which in turn just sits on your desk bare as there are no legs or rubber feet.
The Tsunami might not be the Ultimate product the name suggests - but it does provide some form of two disk external storage and it's undeniably great value.
While the Tsunami Ultimate II 3500 might look like any other USB drive caddy out there it does have one appealing hook: it's the cheapest dual-disk drive caddy on the market. At just £21, Tsunami assures us we'll find nothing cheaper - and as far as we can tell, it is right.
Click to enlarge
That said, being the cheapest doesn't always mean worth buying, and while we didn't expect much for an Adam Smith and some change, the Tsunami does in fact have a few interesting features.
Click to enlarge
The box says it sports both RAID 0/1 or JBOD for two SATA hard drives, however neither setting really worked like we expected. There's a strange switch on the back that selects between "big" and "JBOD" yet we couldn't actually find how to select either RAID mode. Instead of the JBOD setting morphing all the drives into one big one, it just shows them both independently - and they work separately as intended. Both can even be written to/read from at the same time, although you'll sacrifice performance because of the limited bandwidth USB 2 provides. There's no eSATA or USB 3 support, but to expect that for £20 would be unrealistic.
Click to enlarge
The outer shell is a lovely brushed aluminium finish, and in the box there's even a couple of replacement front and back covers in case you fancy something flashier than black!
Click to enlarge
It does have a fan in the back, but it's not too noisy - with a 7,200RPM drive inside you'll probably notice vibration more, especially given that the internal steel shell is directly screwed into the outer aluminium tube, which in turn just sits on your desk bare as there are no legs or rubber feet.
The Tsunami might not be the Ultimate product the name suggests - but it does provide some form of two disk external storage and it's undeniably great value.
21 Comments
Discuss in the forums Replywhen you used the big switch what was the available drive space?
-Tuthmose
Isn't that the point of Just a Bunch of Disks? Or am I misunderstanding the sentence? "JBOD" for independent drives, "big" for one big drive...
Traditional JBOD presents the bunch of disks as one volume.
So where does the RAID0/1 come into play?
seeing i can get a single enclosure for less than half the price (10euros) it's not really that cheap.
But you can't buy a *dual* enclosure in the UK for this price. The power brick is a normal size. Not particularly big, but not very small either.
No sale here.
Performance not so important, for that I use the ones in the computer
Since there doesn't seem to be any actual RAID going on, two enclosures, a USB hub and some duct tape on the other hand might be more price competitive...
But that needs two USB ports, this only needs one.
I gave up on external enclosures, no real need for them. I'd rather have the disks in my PC. USB sticks are large enough these days for any files I need to transport.
In my case while it works fine in JBOD mode making both 2TB drives independently accessible, it does not appear to work as intended in Big mode.
In Big mode all Windows shows in Disk Management is a single disk of only 1678.03 GB in size, not the 3726 GB I was expecting. The 1678.03 GB is a very strange figure as it is less than the size of a single disk in JBOD mode (1863.02 GB). This happens whether the disk is set as an MBR disk in Windows XP or a GPT/GUID disk in WIndows 7. Same thing happens in Windows 7 if it's set as an MBR disk too.
Maybe it just doesn't like my 2TB Samsung Spinpoint F3EG disks in Big mode, so for me it's JBOD mode only - at least it saves on a power socket and a USB port compared to having two enclosures.