Thecus Brings SATA to External Storage

The Brain

All elements of the controller PCB are visible on the image. On the upper left side you can see the eSATA connector, which is surrounded by a shielding metal. Below it you can see the SATA bridge. The controller obviously carries the RAID logic as well as a USB interface. The voltage regulators offer different operating voltages for the drives and the logic.

We were surprised that it is necessary to choose between RAID 0 and RAID 1. RAID 0 will increase performance considerably, but it will put your data at risk, since the data of both drives will be lost if only one fails. If RAID 1 is selected, data is mirrored onto both drives, but the net capacity is split in half. A just a bunch of drives (JBOD would be a suitable alternative, because it spans data across both drives. If one fails, the data on the second drive can be recovered.