Setup & Usage
Getting your drives installed in the trays is very simple. We are using two solid state drives, the ADATA SP900 and the OCZ Vertex 4. One is a 128GB drive and the other is a 256GB drive. All you do is line them up in the trays and secure them with 2 screws on each side. Then just slide them back in the enclosure and they will lock into place. Now just put the back on the enclosure and you are ready to go.
Choose your connection (eSATA, Firewire or USB 2.0) and power on the device by plugging it in. There is no real power switch, which I found a bit odd. When you power the device on the LCD display on the front will light up and let you know what is going on. From there you follow the prompts on the display to setup your drives.
All of the prompts are very easy to read and go through. You can select between either RAID 0 or RAID 1 modes. The drives rebuild very quickly and the process is quite simple. The LCD display will also tell you which RAID mode you are in, the hard drive S.M.A.R.T. information, the enclosure system information and allow you to change some of the settings.
Testing
We will be using HD Tune to test the speed of the Taurus Mini Super-S LCM. We will be testing on both RAID 0 and RAID 1 modes and using the eSATA and USB 2.0 connections (unfortunately our test system does not have a firewire 800 port, as most PC’s do not). Also note the eSATA connection is a SATA 3GB/s connection. We ran HD Tune’s read and write benchmarks, here are our results.
As you can see the results are very close and not much of a difference at all. This is because we used SSD’s and they take both the connections to their max speeds. If the Taurus Mini Super-S LCM was capable of SATA 6GB/s eSATA connectivity we would have seen even faster speeds.
