CineRAID CR-H212 RAID 0/1/JBOD/Normal USB 3.0 Dual 2.5 Bay Silent Hand Held USB 3.0 Bus Powered RAID Enclosure

Pros: I've wanted a portable drive to do redundant backups on for a long time now, and this little piece of kit was exactly what I was looking for. Install was simple, with 2 1TB 5,400 RPM drives installed in a few minutes. Turn the dial to raid 1 and shazam, portable redundancy that doesn't require external power...if you use it on a USB 3.0 port. Transfer speeds could be better but it's likely the rotational speed I chose and not the interface causing the hold up. All in all this is a solid product.

Cons: The major drawback is obvious - USB 3.0 isn't exactly everywhere yet and when you're faced with a USB 2.0 what you have here is a portable drive that requires an AC adapter and wall plug...hampering its portability.

Other Thoughts: All in all a wonderful piece of kit.

Pros: Small, quiet, cool.

Cons: Seems to work fine in Normal mode (both drives show up), but when I switch to BIG or RAID0, I am still getting a single drive size (not 2x as it should be).

Other Thoughts: This would be great, if it worked as advertised. However, it doesn't.

Pros: Good performance, reasonable price, nice styling, and the LEDs aren't too bright.

Cons: No problems so far.

Other Thoughts: Initially with two drives in RAID 1 (1TB Samsung Spinpoint M8), the size seen by the OS was wrong (too small, like another reviewer). This was resolved by connecting the included USB power cable.

Pros: Hardware RAID built in.
Required USB cables included.
Easy Assembly and Vice Versa.
Not Ugly.

Cons: Not any from me, it works as intended for what I want it to do.

Other Thoughts: Got this as part of a SSD combo sale with MIR on it so the price was rather good. After some process of replacing some HDDs to SSDs on laptops in the house, I was left over with 2 500GB 2.5inch HDDs to play with so I popped them into this enclosure for RAID-0 to see what I would get. CrystalDiskMark reported 160MB/s read and write on Asrock Z77 Extreme6 Intel USB3 port, and I haven't ran into power problems like one of the other reviewers.

I have tossed some games on it in case I need them on the go: TERA, Planetside 2, Guild Wars 2, League of Legend, and Firefall, etc. all copied without fail. I have also used it for recording FRAPS in 1080p 30/60FPS with lossless RGB off without a single frame drop so it's quiet consistent.

Pros: If it worked, hardware RAID in an external enclosure.

Cons: Did not work with a set of matched WD Caviar Black 250gb drives. When attached to my MBP with Mountain Lion 10.8.2 the system would only see 80gb. Same thing when attached to a Win7 laptop. Nothing worked, no matter how many times I tried. Tried checking their website for drive compatibility but couldn't find anything.

Got conflicting info as well, one place said it supported SATA III, another said SATA II. ???

Other Thoughts: This is a fantastic idea, and I wish it worked. Speeds would have (theoretically) been great on read speed (I was mirroring the drives). SSD's were too expensive for me to buy two just to see if they worked, but would be even better than HDD's!

My two drives are less than a year old, so they should have been compatible. If you are thinking of buying, keep that in mind.

Maybe if they improve the compatibility in v2 I might try it again.

Pros: Sturdy aluminum case, compact, fast. I have 2 drives as a RAID 1 setup and I love it. I get an easy 20+ MB/s write. I'm only using 5400 rpm drives.

Cons: A built-in usb 3.0 hub would be nice so it doesn't take my only port over.

Pros: Copying from a Windows 7 laptop via USB 3.0 is real fast even with RAID 1. I was able to copy 500MB files (Each file about 500MB) in less than 15 seconds. On a USB 2.0 it takes a little more time, about 30-50 seconds but it works.

I have not tried removing the drives and adding new drives to test if it rebuilds, but i am hoping it will do that.

Cons: I tried copying my outlook files some of which has grown to 2GB each. The drive on Win 7 will disconnect after a few seconds. The copy shows up in the Windows progress bar. The first few seconds the copy will progress fast but when almost towards the end of copy progress bar will freeze. The lights will be solid but no activity. That means the power is still there for the drive from USB port

I have tried different files which are more than 1.5GB size and it does the same thing. I will have to stop the copy, eject the drive, wait for a few seconds and connect it back. After a couple of tries, i was finally able to copy the entire 2GB file.

Although the smaller files copied without issues, there is an issue with the large size. I bought this one to backup some of the critical files that i want to be carrying around, like my outlook files, some installation files.

Other Thoughts: Did the files mirror across both the drives. Yes - i checked one of the drives on an another enclosure and i did find the outlook file and the other smaller files i copied.

I am just going to continue using this and for larger files i will have another portable files, just as backup to this backup.

Pros: Does what it's supposed to. Reasonable throughput (~25 MB/sec read/write via USB 2.0, ~120 MB/sec read/write via USB 3.0 using standard 7200 RPM SATA laptop drives). Has a simple effective design for a small, basic RAID1 connection: aluminum body, plastic interior drive sled and end caps. Includes all the screws you need to attach two drives and even a tiny philips screwdriver. Also includes USB 3.0 cable and a 2nd USB cable in case you need extra power to support a USB 2.0 connection.

Cons: Very minimal instructions. Not really hard to set up, although I could see a non-technically inclined or technical though inattentive person (like me) thrown somewhat for a loop when setting up RAID1. See below for more. Most people would appreciate a slightly larger screwdriver than the one included.

Other Thoughts: I bought this to use as a semi-portable RAID1 enclosure for a couple of Windows machines. It seems good for that, although you end up spending more for drives since this holds only 2.5" ones rather than the cheaper 3.5" size. Also, in RAID1 configuration once the enclosure can't detect both drives you can no longer read to/write from the enclosure at all -- you need to swap in a replacement drive so it can start rebuilding the RAID1 and so you regain access. So you might want to have a 3rd drive handy depending on your access needs and paranoia level. The enclosure's blue LEDs do a good job of indicating which drive has gone south.

The instructions include pictures and wording for the toggle settings for the various modes (normal, spanned, RAID0, RAID1). The word descriptions match how the device works, although the pictures seemed flipped to me. My device came set up for a normal configuration, and because I was looking only at the pictures it took me a while before I realized that I needed to flip both of them to configure it for RAID1. Duh me.

While I appreciate the enclosure's small size, it doesn't leave a lot of room for air circulation -- I don't think this would work so well in a situation where someone wanted to fill up both drive bays and to keep this powered up and running day in, day out.

Too bad that NewEgg had a great price over the Black Friday weekend, and now it's gone back up -- around 2x what I got it for. Great deal with the old pricing, OK deal now IMO.