Buy.com has the Cavalry SATA 2-Bay USB 2.0 Dock EN-CAHDD2B-ZB for $45 - $20 rebate [Exp 2/1] = $25 with free shipping. This two-bay, hot-swappable USB 2.0 dock is perfect for lumping together your odd-capacity drives into one Spanning device. Supports JBOD and BIG (Spanning) configurations.
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I imagine that once the two drives are spanned together, they are a single unit and can't be removed and used for anything else. But these docks aren't really an ideal solution for such permanent use, you'd want an enclosure for that. I'm just saying.
I bought one last week and it seems to work fine.
One great use I can think of for this is, if you are planning your External storage to be all bare drives, this dock will be a great space/cost/power adapter plug saver if you have to transfer data between two bare drives. I'd have totally bought this if I already didn't have enough free combo docks from NewEgg.
had one for a year now .... it's invaluable ... great deal.
USB = literal waste of time.
#5, I wouldn't say that. I thought the same too, with a 5-year old Dell desktop I had (it has USB 2.0, but could barely do 500Mbs/minute). I bought a new laptop earlier this month, and it transfers between two USB 2.0 devices at about 1GB/per minute (~16 MBps), even faster if between the laptop and the External drive. To me, that's good enough, since I rarely transfer more than 8GB at a given time.
I've never tried eSATA yet. What's the REALISTIC speed on eSATA that some of you have observed? If the difference is large enough, I may consider getting an eSATA ExpressCard.
I've got a few drives in external enclosures with both USB 2.0 & eSATA connections. I've never seen any significant differences in transfer rates between the eSATA connection & the USB 2.0 connection. True, the drives aren't the fastest: they're 7200RPM SATA 160GB to 500GB drives with 8MB and 16MB caches, but for those at least, the bottlenecks are in the mechanics of the drive, not in the electronics of the interfaces.
Realistically the eSATA/USB2 speed difference depends on what drives are plugged in. With a current generation 7200 RPM 3.5" drive, eSATA is roughly 2.5X as fast. With an SSD it's far larger.
Even quite old 5400 drives with low cache are bottlenecked pretty bad by USB2, though you won't notice as much if dealing only with large files, sequential R/W.
If you have a fast enough CPU, you can actually do -better- in terms of transfer speed by compressing an external USB drive.
Of course, the same is true for eSATA.
Not much difference between USB and eSATA???? Folks- there is a HUGE difference. Of course systems/drives vary, but if you're just looking at the interface eSATA is more than 6X faster 480Mbps Vs. 3Gbps. Granted those aren't speeds "at the wheels", but real world performance translates to 6X faster if set up correctly.
try transfering gigabytes of files using USB, it will take forever compared to eSata.
Esata is the same as sata just the cable is going to the outside.