miniEPICa SATAII RAID System Review

We recently received a miniEPICa SATAII RAID system for review to see how it performs and what it's capable of. The miniEPICa has 5 x 2.5 inch drive bays which can be configured in several RAID configurations. Each drive bay can contain a hot-swappable drive that can quickly be removed and replaced should there be any failures. The unit it's self can connect to your computer via a USB 2.0 port or Firewire.

Before we look more in to detail of the device I thought it would be best to explain why you might need it. Over the last few years most people store a lot of data that includes photos, music, video, emails and various other bits of information. Should your computer suffer a harddrive failure you could potentially loose a lot of information if not all of it. Using an external drive still puts you at risk as you could loose data on that too if the drive fails there. By using a RAID system the storage uses several disks to spread the data across. When one drive fails you can simply remove the broken drive, insert a new drive and the lost data will be copied from the other disks in the array leaving you with all data in tact.

On to the review....

Looks wise the device is sleek and compact. The unit can sit on your desk in either tower mode so the disks spin horizontally, or desktop mode where the disks spin vertically. The main unit is well built and feels very sturdy. To remove and install drives you simply push the button next to each drive bay where the handle opens out for you to pull the drive out. Installation is simple in that you just need to attach the new drives to the drive bay and slot them back in to place. Screws are provided and installation per drive just takes a minute or two.

Configuration is also simple and once drives are correctly installed in the unit you simply hook it up to your computer, install some software supplied on the CD and go through a quick setup to configure the type of RAID system you want.

To start you need to select what type of RAID configuration you want. For my tests I went with RAID 5 that allows the loss of one drive without loosing data. Other RAID versions possible are RAID 0, 1, LARGE, 3, CLONE and 5. Depending on how you want data to be stored and what type of redundancy you want you can select the RAID configuration as needed.

Once selected a progress bar is displayed and once complete your drive is "almost" ready to go. The next step requires you right click My Computer, go to Manage and select the new disk that appears in the list. You then need to tell Windows what type of disk you want and then format it. Once that is complete your RAID storage system then shows up as an extra drive in your Explorer window.

Configuration was fairly simple and took around 15 - 20 minutes to get things up and running. An included A4 sheet printed in colour shows several steps to get things going including walking you through each of the options and how to enable the drive in Windows and format it. This will be a welcomed supplement for those who are not too confident in configuring RAID systems.

In conclusion, it's compact measuring just 5 inches tall, it can store over 2TB of data depending on how many and what capacity drives you buy along with it. It's built well and has hot-swappable disks. Overall an impressive and easy to use system well worth looking at should you need some external storage that's more secure than a single external harddrive.

The miniEPICa is available from Storage Depot. More details are also available at the manufacturers site Proware.