Tsunami eData II 3500 review

Verdict:

Review Date: 18 Sep 2008

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: Alan Lu

Our Rating 2 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Tsunami's eData II 3500 is a hard disk enclosure that can accommodate two 3½in SATA disks and connect them to your computer using either eSATA or USB.

Like Western Digital's My Book, it supports both RAID 0 and 1, making it the first enclosure we've seen to support either.

There aren't any removable disk trays, but fitting disks isn't difficult using the screwdriver and Allen key provided in the box. Unfortunately, the RAID selection switch on the back of the eData is very small, and it's easy to select the wrong configuration.

We were disappointed by the eData's performance. It fared poorly at transferring small files, although it was fast at copying large files over eSATA when configured as RAID 0. Unfortunately, it was still slower than other eSATA RAID 0 arrays we've seen. Its eSATA performance when configured as RAID 1 was inconsistent. It was slow at writing large files and reading small files, but was fast at reading large files and writing small files. Over USB, it was slower than many non-RAID USB disks, no matter which RAID configuration we chose.

Up to 50 per cent of your storage space can be used as a RAID 1 array, while the rest can be used simultaneously as a separate RAID 0 array. Unfortunately, its performance in this configuration was still dismal.

We had high hopes for the eData II 3500, but its performance isn't good enough for us to recommend it. Unless you must have the security of RAID 1, Enermax's Jazz is a much better enclosure.

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