Wiebetech Silver SATA Raid review

FireWire is fast, but SATA (Serial ATA) is even faster.

Apple uses internal SATA drives in its high-end Macs, but few manufacturers make external units for more flexible storage solutions. Wiebetech has taken the initiative, though, and its new Silver SATA Raid line, due out in January next year, shows what this technology can achieve.

We were able to conduct exclusive hands-on tests of the two-drive Silver SATA Dual Bay Raid and five-drive Silver SATA 5 Bay Raid units as well as the basic Silver SATA Single Bay device. Each bay contains a removable drive 'sled' that locks in place with a levering arm. The drives fitted into the Wiebetech drive trays were all 7200RPM Hitachi Deskstar 250GB and 500GB SATA devices, the kind that AM Micro, Wiebetech's UK distributor, recommends for overall performance and reliability for this kind of product.

You can't connect an external SATA device to a Mac without adding a SATA port, as Apple doesn't yet provide this as an option. We used the new Wiebetech high-speed SATA PCI card with a new driver for the five-drive unit and a standard eight-port SATA card to connect the single and dual-drive units to our test Power Mac G5. Both cards gave a single port on the outside of the Mac, with the rest supplied as on-card ports for use within the computer.

When we put these products to the test we got some interesting results. The single drive device performed roughly as well as the internal drives in the G5; just under 60GB a second for our large sustained data writing tests. It managed this without any hint of dropouts, the bane of a video editor's life, but this wasn't the star of Wiebetech's show.

The two-bay device came next. This can be set to either Raid level 0 (the two devices striped together as one double-size fast volume) or level 1 (the two devices mirrored as one single-size safe volume). When we tested the dual-bay device's performance we set it to Raid 0, where the two drives are striped together as one volume. This shares the data-writing task between the two units, speeding up the throughput dramatically. We achieved sustained throughputs of just under 90MB a second with this device, easily beating every single drive throughput score we've seen so far. Combining the performance of drive striping with SATA's reliability means this is a great solution for those who need drop-free data throughput. And when this is set to Raid 1, where you see a single volume but data is written to both simultaneously, you get decent performance and the reliability of drive redundancy. If one unit develops a fault the Silver SATA case beeps an alarm, but the other drive carries on as normal. Remove the troublesome unit and slot in a replacement, and the drive array will rebuild itself automatically.

It was the five-bay device that was the real performance king, though. We used the new Wiebetech high-speed SATA card with a custom driver to work with this unit, but apart from running the software installer it was no harder than the previous units to install and use. The five 500GB drives were striped together to give us a total pre-formatted capacity of 2.5 terabytes - more than 2.6 million megabytes. In sustained high-volume data throughput tests, typical of the stresses of professional video and audio editing, the Silver SATA 5 Bay Raid unit managed just a little under 180MB a second of sustained data transfer. This is a staggering performance for any storage product, let alone something designed for portability as well as ease of use - and connected using a single cable and port.