Question 1

I see that this enclosure connects via 2 USB 3 ports.  I would imagine  SATA III will run at those speeds, even if the built-in SATA is only SATA II?
  I have a little Acer netbook that's a few years old, and came with one SATA II internal connection.  But I believe I can set the BIOS to boot from the USB 3 port (it only has one USB 3 port) if I were to use a USB 3 hub?  Or use an external power supply?  The netbook came stock with Windows 7 and ran beautifully, but it does not run windows 10 very well at all, even with an internal SSD.  I am going to revert it back to windows 7, and wonder if I could use this for raid if I set my BIOS to boot from the USB 3 port.  Thoughts?

Accepted Answer

I have used this enclosure with two 2.5" HDDs and run it off of one USB port. I tested it with USB 2.0 & USB 3.0 and both times it ran fine from only one port.
So I concluded that the second port is there to be used only when necessary. 
As for your question about booting off a USB port, I believe Windows has restrictions on booting of an external device. Installation of Windows works fine, but regular Windows installations may not work.
You can try it though.

Apart from that, there are some issues with Windows 10 working with older hardware. I have installed Windows 10 on 8-year old laptops, desktops, a netbook and it works fine but I had very poor battery life on a 10-month old powerful Dell Precision laptop. You may never have the same performance for your netbook on Windows 10 that you obtained on Windows 7.

Good Luck.

Question 2

I have a broken mobo on a laptop with 2 500gig drives set as a 1 t raid 0
If I put my 2 raid drives in this will i be able to pull the files off with a non raid pc?

Accepted Answer

I am not sure if you could just set it to raid 0 and make it work. I know one factor would be the stripe size set on the array. I didn't see any documentation with this that defines stripe size.  However there is software that can reconstruct a raid array from separated disks. I would go that route. I fear that your data would get corrupted if you put it in this enclosure set to raid 0. Better off with software and JBOD.

Question 3

Can this be used in non-RAID mode with a single drive installed or does it require two drives?

Accepted Answer

It does seem to have a mode to allow that yes.

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