SimpleTech 2TB SimpleDrive Pro Duo USB 2.0/eSata External Drive (FP-UFE2/2TB)

From Hitachi
	Price: $499.99
Similar Items - Kingston DataTraveler 8 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive DT100/8GB	Accessories No Accessories.
Features - High performance storage for data-intensive applications - Fabrik Ultimate Backup for unbeatable online protection - High speed USB 2.0 and blazing-fast 3Gb eSata - RAID 0 for performance or RAID 1 for protection - Smart fan for quiet reliability Product Description PRODUCT FEATURES:High performance storage for data-intensive applicationsRAID 0 for performance or RAID 1 for protectionStackable with Pro and Simple Drive designsFabrik Ultimate Backup for unbeatable online protectionFabrik local backup for onsite protectionHigh speed USB 2.0 and blazing- fast 3Gb eSATASmart fan for quiet reliabilitySecurity lock slotQuick and easy installation Customer Reviews Great Product Date: 2009-03-03 | Rating: 5 I have owned this item for over a year now and it works flawlessly. I have it setup as a RAID 1 (total redundancy) backup drive and backup to it once per week. Easy to use and no problems. I use a free backup software called syncback (Windows only) for backing up everything. Simple settup, inconvenient when one disk dies Date: 2009-11-23 | Rating: 3 I bought this after the RAID utility in a comparable Buffalo box wouldn't switch to RAID 1. No problem with this drive, as you do it through a mechanical switch on the back of the box. The other "nice" thing about this SimpleTech box is that the only printed instructions were printed directly on the inside flap of the box! In connecting it up to a USB port, I saw that the drive was already configured NTFS RAID 0, with documentation files on the drive itself. Bring up the startup program and you're presented with a menu of documents, all of which are on the Web. Brought up the one with instructions on how to switch to RAID 1 and followed the instructions. The software included on the drive doesn't touch the drive at all. All it does is provide instructions on how to get Windows to initialize the drive! That actually kind of gives my heart warm fuzzies. The only "software" from SimpleTech that physically accesses the drive is the RAID firmware built into the drive hardware itself. When I speak above about "how to get Windows to initialize the drive," I should say, how to FORMAT the drive, because (as I had forgotten) "initializing" a drive has a technical meaning and "initializing" a drive must be performed before formatting the drive. I had to look up how to do that in the Microsoft Help. The documentation included on the duo pro drive itself does not mention this "initializing" step and I had to figure that out for myself. The SimpleTech documentation does state that it will take a long time to "rebuild the RAID structure" as they call it. This apparently is a high level way of saying, "formatting the drive for RAID 1" because in the entire procedure to bring this drive up I didn't see a single step explicitly called "rebuilding the RAID structure." At the end of the the format (which took 12 hours), the Windows Disk Management Utility simply and suddenly shows the drive as formatted and set to NTFS with the volume name I gave it. At this point, it's ready to receive files and you can just use Windows Explorer to copy and paste files. I had a 750 Gbyte eSATA drive with 400 GBytes of data I wanted to put on the duo pro, so I just copy and pasted. I started that operation about two hours ago and it's 25% through with the operation. So far the copy operation is proceeding without incident and the drive is staying quite cool. In any case, figure 12 hours to "rebuild the RAID structure" and another 8 hours to copy 400 GBytes to the drive. The SimpleTech instructions makes this claim: "Note: The Duo Pro Drive can accomodate ormal [sic] read/write activities after the mode change (during the rebuild) but the transfer rate will be slower." Really? I can copy files to the drive while it is being formatted? I didn't want to test this theory so I didn't try it. Other things I noticed is that the instructions for formatting the drive must have been taken from the Windows XP Disk Management Utility because it talked about "creating a new partition" and under Vista you have "creating a new volume." Apparently by the time Microsoft developed Vista they thought that users are far too stupid to understand what "partition" means but would have no trouble knowing what a volume is. Sorry. I found this extremely confusing. The instructions should have been smart enough to figure out whether it was running on XP or Vista and brought up a different set of text for the two operating systems. I'm a software developer and I know this isn't rocket science. Software developers should do that as a matter of course. Now, what about when one of the drives in the duo pro fails? To my chagrin, after buying this unit and opening the box, I learned that customers can't replace the disk themselves. They are instructed to copy the drive that still works to another drive (just buy another unit, I suppose!) and call customer service. Well, I guess you get what you pay for. If you want flexibility, pay the big bucks. This thing was dirt cheap and I guess at prices like this, they just expect you to throw them away when they fail. But other people reviewing this product report a total meltdown, where you can't get at either drive without physically removing them from the box and installing them in some kind of other enclosure. Doesn't sound like fun. I guess beggars can't be choosy. Other reviewers are complaining about this drive failing catastrophically after just hours or perhaps just a few months of use. If that happens to me, I'll be writing another review (under my wife's login because Amazon won't let you change a rating). In the meantime, I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt because everything seems to be working reasonably well. I haven't tested it yet, but reading from this drive should be much faster the writing, since you only have to read from one copy of the data. Writing requires two drives and writing is always slower than reading anyhow. Most of my accesses to this drive will be reading, so it should work OK. Finally, people have complained that the case is made out of "flimsy plastic" and it often comes cracked and destroyed through the mail. I must say that it doesn't LOOK all that bad. It's at least painted to look like metal. I know it's more convenient to buy from Amazon than go to your local computer store, but for those close to Fry's, you can usually get it cheaper from Fry's than from Amazon and it's even easier to replace the unit if it's DOA. The other thing is, what do you want for peanuts? Personally, I plan on handling the unit with kid gloves and not knock it about. Of course I'll have to keep an eagle eye out on the grandchildren when they're around, but such is life in the big city. If you want robustness, pay the big bucks and get a tank. That's about all I have to say on that score. Addendum: I finished downloading my 400 GB without incident. It took about 7 hours and the front light was blinking furiously the whole time (naturally). The drive case was only mildy warm during the whole ordeal. Then I disconnected the drive and moved it to its permanent home, my wife's computer. I did all the work on my Vista machine. My wife's machine is XP. No problem getting it up and running. Just plugged it in and turned it on. One problem with the drive is that it's quite noisy when it seeks: a series of dull thuds which I've been hearing from PC disk drives for decades, although some manufacturers have solved this problem. You might want to put it on the floor. I've since researched this drive some more and looked at alternatives. From reports I've read, this drive is apparently quite fragile and as I've mentioned above, is not designed for error recovery. It's simply the "poor man's" RAID 1 drive. But the whole point of RAID 1 is data integrity. It's just totally unacceptable that you have to "contact the manufacturer" when one of the disks goes bad. If you want more than a "toy" RAID 1 drive, you really need hot swappable controllers and disks in metal cases. For that you're going to pay a lot more. At least this drive has forced air cooling. Any solution that doesn't will soon die. Don't believe it when you hear a case has "good heat sinks" that will protect the drive. Lies, all lies. The manufacturer must has stock in the disk drive manufacturing companies. Do NOT buy this product! Date: 2010-01-22 | Rating: 1 Ok so i bought the 2tb drive from Frys in southern CA. had it for about one month and was still in the process of copying stuff over to it. I had about 700MB copied to it. And i go to turn it on one day and a message pops up on my desktop saying would you like to initilize the drive? as in they are empty and it wants me to format it! What the! of course i did not do that. shut down started over! same thing! I asked Frys electronics what to do and they said basically im screwed! Oh and that they also would not take it back or refund me my money either! Same thing with simple tech comstomer service! basically said there was nothing to do that this just happens sometimes! Thats unexceptable! im so mad! I strongly suggest not buying this product! from - "madatsimpletech" Noisy Fan Date: 2010-02-05 | Rating: 1 I have had the 2TB drive for a while (1 yr). I returned it twice because the fan is noisy. The third one is no different. I just purchased the 4TB drive, and the fan is even noisier than all the other ones. The noise is quite distracting. If you have this in your bedroom, you will not be able to go to sleep. Lost data twice with this drive Date: 2009-08-05 | Rating: 1 The original one of these drives that I bought failed after about 45 days - just enough time to have copied a lot of data onto it, and to lose it all. SimpleTech replaced that drive under warranty, and this second one failed 3 days later. Not so much data lost this time. (It failed by losing power completely, so even RAID 1 did not save the data). While disk drives are not perfectly reliable I have never had such an unbelievably high failure rate on any of the many drives I've purchased over the years. I won't be buying SimpleTech / Fabrik again.