Buffalo Technology DriveStation Duo 2.0 TB (2 x 1 TB) USB 2.0 & FireWire Combo External Hard Drive HD-W2.0IU2/R1 Review

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(More customer reviews)I usually do not write reviews but this time after spending so much time doing a research on a good external RAID1 hard drive and finding no useful information I figured I'll write one up to save other people time and money.

I've read a whole bunch of reviews on Amazon and other websites all people complaining about DriveStation Duo RAID-1 configuration on Windows. Not sure what those people did wrong but they definitely got me concerned before buying this unit.

Before choosing this unit I've compared whole bunch of products available. I was looking for external hard drive either USB or NAS that supports RAID-1 for redundancy and I need to have a flexibility to swap one of the hard drives if needed in case it crashes after warranty expires by not going to the manufacture. Out of all products I looked at (Linksys, Buffalo, Maxtor, Iomega, SimpleTech and many others) I liked Linksys NAS200 the best as it gives you most flexibility with hard drives you choose and Linksys usually have a pretty good software to configure and maintain their hardware but the only downside with NAS200 was the speed. I don't need high transfer rates but I do need at least 10Mb/sec when NAS200 was producing around 3Mb/sec.

When I got the hard drive the one thing I was concerned about is configuring it for RAID-1 based on all the problems other users had (from reviews). I just ran a disk utility that comes with the drive, connected hard drive via USB and then configured it for RAID-1. It was that easy. No problems on Windows XP as other people reported. Then I just formatted the drive using Disk Management utility and it is ready to go.
I even decided to test redundancy so I copied some files to the drive and shut it down and pulled out one drive out of it. Started it back up and the drive was accessible with all the files there. So then I shut it down again and reconnected the drive and it started rebuilding it. According to their doc on the website it is supposed to take 8-11 hours for 500Gb hard drive but after 18 hours it did not finish and I decided to call tech support. After calling tech support they confirmed that the reconnected drive will not rebuild since it expects brand new drive RAW formatted and a drive formatted other than RAW it will go in infinite loop trying to rebuild it. First tech support suggested to format the drive while it was rebuilding it (which I didn't think was a good idea but did it anyway) and that didn't work (2-3 hours wasted). Then after keeping me on hold while (probably) reading some documentation tech support rep. said that because I opened up front cover the warranty is void and they can't replace it for me so he suggested returning back to the place where I got it from since there's no way to fix the problem any more. Then I figured I'll take it into my own hands and tried using DiskUtility to change the drive back to Normal Mode (2 independent drives) and that worked fine but changing it back to RAID-1 failed with misspelled error "Disk Restracturing failed". So, I formatted each drive using FAT32 (back to default formatting) and then tried converting it back to RAID-1 and it worked just fine.

At the end here are pros and cons of this hard drive:
+ Supports RAID-1
+ High transfer rate
+ Auto-power shut off (via USB). Nice feature. Starts up the drive when you start up your computer and shuts it off when you shut down computer.
+ Swappable hard drives. After hands on experience with the hard drive I found out that it will not be that easy to change them, but at least it'll get you the data if one crashes.
+ Easy to access hard drives - just few screws away
+ No need to install all kinds of drivers and whole bunch of useless memory and CPU wasting software to make this unit work. It is literally Plug-n-Play. Windows recognizes this unit without any issues. You can format it using Disk Management in Windows.
+ Comes with 2 Seagate hard drives and not some proprietary like other manufactures
- 1 year warranty. Some websites advertise 3 years warranty for this drive but support confirmed that it is actually 1 year
- Tech support. Doesn't seem like they know what they're talking about. They kept putting me on hold every time I ask them any question. My guess, they were looking for answers in some documents because they didn't know. Really takes them long time to come back with an answer and at the end those answers are useless and misleading.

So at the end, the drive seems to be performing as advertised. I got about 30Mb/sec when copying large files and over 100Mb/sec when copying some MP3 files. At the end, I think this is a good bang for the buck.

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Product Description:
2TB 2X500GB DRIVESTATION DUO EXT 7200RPM TT SATA RAID 0/1 USB 2.0

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