It doesn't look like RAID is required in that case, it's just supported. It only supports RAID 1 and RAID 0 anyway, though, and neither of those is very desirable... RAID 0 means that if either drive fails, you lose ALL the information on BOTH drives. It gets you a very marginal performance gain for a 50% decrease in reliability.
RAID 1, on the other hand, mirrors all your data. It's great for backups but obviously you have to use two identical drives and you can only use half as much storage space as you own. Personally I'd just stay away from RAID entirely because it's not meant for normal, budget-conscious consumers.
To the point, though, that looks like a great enclosure that doesn't cost much more than single-drive FW800 enclosures. It looks like you should be able to install both drives and have them work independently, without any kind of RAID setup. Note that in the description, it says "Perfect for mass storage or RAID," implying that RAID isn't the only possible configuration.
|