Avolusion RG4UE-B Quad Bay Enclosure

Newegg Rosewill Dual Bay SATA to USB Enclosure $35 Discuss (2)

ZipZoomFly ENERMAX Aluminum 2.5" USB 2.0 Enclosure $5 Discuss (0)

Newegg Rosewill 3.5" SATA to USB/eSATA Enclosure $25 Discuss (0)

Tiger Direct Thecus N4100PRO 4 Bay AMD NAS Server $345 Discuss (2)

JBOD isn't really RAID
at all, it is sort of a "third cousin" of RAID... JBOD can be thought of as the opposite of partitioning: while partitioning chops single drives up into smaller logical volumes, JBOD combines drives into larger logical volumes. It provides no fault tolerance, nor does it provide any improvements in performance compared to the independent use of its constituent drives. (In fact, it arguably hurts performance, by making it more difficult to use the underlying drives concurrently, or to optimize
different drives for different uses.)

When you look at it, JBOD doesn't really have a lot to recommend it. It still requires a controller card or software driver, which means that almost any system that can do JBOD can also do RAID 0, and RAID 0 has significant performance advantages over JBOD. Neither provide fault tolerance, so that's a wash.

JBOD can be implemented in software in XP (it's called "spanning"), as can RAID 0 and RAID 1.

What most people don't get about RAID setups is that the onboard RAID controllers on motherboards and software RAID solutions of any sort are unadulterated crap compared to the performance you can get from a dedicated PCIe 4 lane (or better) controller.

It's like the difference between the really crappy onboard Intel video garbage on every motherboard, and a proper PCIe 16 lane nVidia card.

To post comments, please Sign In or Register.       Forgot Password?

Registration takes seconds! Once registered you'll have members only access to a Favorites bookmark list, a fully customizable User Profile, and the ability to instantly add your thoughts to each discussion topic.