Introduction

External Storage devices have come a long way. It all began with the good old floppy disks which a hand full of people surprisingly still use today, then we saw the transition to CD/DVD media, USB keys/pen drives, pocket sized HDDs, and 2.5"/3.5" HDD enclosures.

BUT, what happens when the data on that device decides to pack up on you? - That's when it hits you; you hear that voice in your head saying "I should've done that back up I kept telling myself to do in the past!"

An interesting feature is the implementation of RAID in external enclosures. As many would know, RAID was predominantly available for high-end server machines and large scale business enterprises. Nowadays this feature is enabled across many user desktop platforms, allowing for mirroring, spanning and spanning with mirroring (speed, redundancy or both).

For this feature we will be using the striping method, that being RAID-0. This provides the highest possible performance with additional storage space, but with no fault tolerance.

Getting your hands on this device should solve your problems when it comes to flexible mobile storage with fail-safe protection. This is Enhance Technology's T4H CR. The unit comprises a very nicely built enclosure with handles for easy mobility, four HDD eSATA bays, a built-in LCD display for setup and configuration, and last but most certainly not least, a RAID controller with levels 0, 0+1 and 5. An independent PSU and rear mounted case fan is also resident.

Before we get into the benchmarking side of things, let's perform a close physical inspection of the unit itself to get the full gist of what's on offer.