As a salute to the Spice Girls, StarTech embraces when two become one
Anyone who's had a number of computers up to this point will have some spare items, often drives from long deceased laptops.
The S252BU33R by StarTech is a means of easily taking 2.5” SATA drives and repackaging them for reuse by a desktop system through USB.
Without any scale reference, this looks like a typical 3.5” dual drive enclosure, but at just 90mm high and 50mm, wide it’s much smaller and occupies significantly less desk space.
Inside are two bays that accept any 2.5” drive, physical or SSD, in widths from 5mm to 15mm. You can place a single drive or two in there and simply connect the box to an available USB 3.0 port and a provided power adapter, and you’ll have access to those volumes like they were internally mounted.
The box uses a JMicron JM5561 chip to manage the drives, and that also allows you to operate them in one of four possible combinations. You can stripe for performance (RAID 0), mirror for redundancy (RAID 1), just use them directly (JBOD) or span them so the capacities are combined into a single volume.
That last option is useful if the drives you have aren’t the same size but you want a single facility with all the capacity allocated to it.
Setting these up is probably the weakest aspect of this design, because it involves having the cover off and setting dip switches while the unit is plugged in. Why StarTech didn’t put the switches on the outside, I have no idea. However, once configured, I’d doubt you're likely to be altering it very often.
In my testing I used a couple of old Western Digital drives, each capable of about 115MB/s read and write, and individually that’s what they delivered in this box in JBOD mode.
Under striping mode, I was able to boost that to nearly 200MB/s, an improvement certainly worth having. However, it should be noted that if your motherboard supports RAID modes, you could achieve the same by internally mounting the drives and configuring them for RAID 0 in the BIOS.
Those wondering if this will work for SSDs, the answer is emphatically ‘yes’, although the maximum 5Gbps bandwidth on that technology only translates into a theoretical 640MB/s. The long and short of that is that you won’t be seeing a doubling of performance with two 500MB/s SSDs, unfortunately.
But the biggest problem confronting this device is the price, which is well beyond the benefits that it's likely to deliver, even if you’ve got many 1GB 2.5” drives to spare. For less than the cost of the S252BU33R, you can buy a WD Elements Desktop 3TB external drive, and that comes with a 3.5” 3TB drive preinstalled. Or for just a few pounds more you can get you can get a 480GB SanDisk SSD Plus with a cheap USB 3.0 enclosure that would outperform any physical drives in whatever RAID mode.
On that basis, you need to be very convinced that this makes economic sense to you, before splashing out. Mark Pickavance
External RAID enclosure for spare laptop drives.