iNEO has introduced their I-NA305J Dual Bay JBOD Storage System for SATA Hard Disk Drives. This hard drive enclosure has these useful features:
- Aluminum Alloy Casing with a powerful adjustable fan.
- Front Blue LCD Panel that indicates power and hard disk drive access activity.
- USB 2.0 Transfer Rates.
- Supports SATA I and SATA II Drives up to 1TB Each.
- Plug and Play with Hot Swappable Drive Bays
- Lock to secure drives bays and Lock Hole to secure the enclosure to the desk.
- One Touch Backup Button
With Digital Convergence finally becoming a reality, the first thing we’re all starting to notice is that we NEED more storage. USB Hard Drive Enclosures have been helping fill this void as it’s an easy way to quickly expand the available storage on your computer. By using an extra drive, or purchasing a new one, you can quickly put this into the iNEO Enclosure to add more space to your PC.
A Walk Around the Unit
The front panel provides you quick status of if the drive is powered up along with hard drive activity leds. On the back of the unit, your find the power switch and the fan speed selector switch. Assuming you do not use your drive a lot, you can probably leave this off, but if you feel that your drives are getting too hot, you can choose the Low or High Fan speeds. iNEO has also included a Lock Hole so you could secure this enclosure to your desk if you were in a high theft risk area. (College, Work Places, Library, Mall, Etc.)
Screwless Design!
The iNEO Drive Enclosure is a cleverly designed tool-less unit. This makes it really easy to quickly add and remove drives from the enclosure. The enclosure is also designed to accept either 1 or 2 drives. With one 1 inserted, it essential acts as any other simple hard drive enclosure and pass the drive onto the OS. When 2 drives are inserted into the enclosure, the controller in the enclosure will combines the drives into JBOD mode and pass along 1 larger combined drive to the OS. (See the JBOD section for more details.)
Software
The iNEO Enclosure is very easy to install, all of the newer operating systems (Windows XP, Vista, 2003, 2008, OSX and Linux) have the native drivers built in to support this hard drive enclosure.
In addition to the native hard drive support, iNEO provides software called PCClone EX with the enclosure. (http://www.gotofnet.com/ANSI/link.php?filename=products/PCClone_EX/index.htm) PCClone EX is a software package that supports 1 button backup along with traditional backup support.
1 Button Backup is a really nice feature, as it gives you a very simple and easy way to backup your computer with a touch of a single button. The button is located on the front of the enclosure and can be configured to work with many of the backup software programs that support 1 touch backup.
Hardware
This is one area where the iNEO enclosure outshines most other enclosures on the market, the tool-less design makes it a snap to install your hard drives. In addition, iNEO has provided a lock to ensure that hard drives are not mistakenly removed.
To install a drive:
- Unlock the enclosure with the provided key.
- Swing open the front cover.
- Unlatch the drive cover.
- Slide in the SATA hard drive.
- Close the drive cover.
While it’s recommended, you do not need to lock or close the front enclosure cover to operate the device. After inserting your hard drives into the enclosure, you are ready to power it up and connect it to your PC.
JBOD = Just a Bunch Of Disks
When you insert 2 drives into the iNEO Enclosure, the internal controller will combine the drives into JBOD mode. JBOD mode is when the hard drive controller takes the storage of each individual hard drive and combines it into 1 logical larger hard drive. In my case, when I combined my 400GB and 250GB hard drives I am provided a single larger 650GB JBOD drive.
As with most technologies, JBOD mode has its advantages and disadvantages. For advantages, the single larger drive is always a plus for most people as you can then have more storage in a single location. This is especially useful for Media Collections, Downloads, Etc. It’s also nice, to not have multiple drives to keep track of when you are trying to locate stuff on your computer.
There are 2 primary disadvantages with JBOD mode:
- Flexibility
With JBOD mode, after you set your initial 2 drives, it becomes almost impossible to change to any other drives. Example: I have a 400GB and a 250GB to make a 650GB. In the future, I can’t just but a 500GB drive and stick it in to make a 900GB drive and keep all the exiting data. Conversely, I cannot just remove the 250GB drive. If I do, the drives will both have to be reformatted and reconfigured. - Failures
In a normal drive, if your drive fails, you lose the data for that 1 single drive. With JBOD, if one of the two drives fails, you lose all the data on BOTH drives. This to me becomes a gamble as the changes of one out of two drives going bad are higher than one out of one.
The iNEO Enclosure performs on par with most other USB 2.0 Hard Drive Enclosures. OCmodshop uses Simpli Software’s HD Tach RW, with this tool we are able to do a complete and thorough read write analysis of the drives performance.
For my setup, I testing the Enclosure with 1 drive and 2 drives, I wanted to see if the enclosure had any performance hit in relation to the JBOD functionality. I was impressed with the results to realize that there is next to no performance hit!
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| INEO Enclosure with 400GB WD Hard Drive | INEO Enclosure with 400GB + 250GB HDD |
Power Consumption
Power consumption is becoming important as we are starting to see better awareness on power consumption and what we can do to reduce our power foot print. OCmodshop tests power consumption by using a P3 Kill A Watt device which is able to provide us exact numbers on the power comsumption of the unit. The iNEO enclosure itself does not require much power, with most of the power consumption being the actual drives. I have provided a breakdown of the power consumption below. My hard drives are Western Digital Caviar SE SATA Drives.
For numbers sake a Mac Mini take 30 watts to run at full power, and the new Dell Inspiron 530s takes 60 watts with 1 hard drive.
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The iNEO I-NA305J Dual Bay JBOD Storage System for SATA Hard Disk Drives is a great enclosure for the money. The value provided by a tool less design that is completely secure by both device locks and the ability to use the Lock Port make this enclosure especially useable in High Risk areas. Performance and Power consumption are on par with most other disk enclosures on the market.
The ability to see the hard drive activity is a nice added bonus. I also really appreciate the ability to configure the fan speed myself, this way I can decide what speed (Or attributed noise level.) is acceptable to me.
The only thing that I find wrong with this enclosure is the JBOD requirement when inserting 2 drives. I’d rather see this being an option where I could choose between JBOD or 2 separate drives. While JBOD has its value, I’d rather lose the data on one of my drives than both my drives.
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1 Comment
It can be used as 2 separate drives. Just insert the first drive and format, power off then insert the second drive and format… Walla! 2 drives, one enclosue!