Portable RAID enclosure?

[Makaseo]

I've been using my old laptop's 500GB 2.5" drive in a USB 3.0 enclosure for a while now, and it's been pretty nice so far.

But I've been hearing a lot about RAID 0 lately, and I was wondering if there were any 2.5" bus-powered USB 3.0 enclosures that have 2 bays capable of running in RAID 0? And if they exist, would it double my read and/or write speeds?

Thanks!

[SubTract]

The bottleneck with a HDD in a USB Caddy is normally the USB. even in USB 3.0 So this wouldn't make any difference anyway.

[Makaseo]

The bottleneck with a HDD in a USB Caddy is normally the USB. even in USB 3.0 So this wouldn't make any difference anyway.

Thanks for the reply, but I don't think I buy that. For USB 2.0, my HDD was bottlenecked to around 40 MB/s, but with my current USB 3.0 enclosure, the HDD is reaching its max at around 90 MB/s, and that's not even close to USB 3.0's claimed max of more than 600 MB/s. External USB 3.0 SSD's don't even go past 500 MB/s, so I think it's safe to hope for 180 MB/s if RAID 0 enclosures work as I'm thinking it will.

My question had more to do with less obvious problems that I might run into, like power limitations from being powered over one USB port or something like that.

[SubTract]

The bottleneck with a HDD in a USB Caddy is normally the USB. even in USB 3.0 So this wouldn't make any difference anyway.

Good luck achieving actual speeds of 500MB/s through USB 3.0 There is a lot more going on then most people take into consideration. (Most itterations of USB use BOT which is very inefficient)

The exception may come if you can find a UASP compatible Raid 0 capable Caddy.

I can get 150MB/s Write and 180MB/s read from my intel 330 120GB SSD in a USB 3.0 caddy. I can only find a couple of people around the internet who have also done this with different drives and they've come up with similar results. I found one who got 200MB/s read but only 150MB/s writes.

Putting them in raid also then gives the USB controller more to try to do as well.

[Makaseo]

The bottleneck with a HDD in a USB Caddy is normally the USB. even in USB 3.0 So this wouldn't make any difference anyway.

Oh jeez I hadn't heard of that, this was the kind of stuff I was asking about, thanks!

I was basing my questions off what I read about the LaCie USB 3.0 SSD, which does only get 200 MB/s writes but reaches 400 MB/s reads, and I'm mainly interested about the read speeds anyway. I guess a lot depends on the controller inside the enclosure, then.

So in the end, do you think any extra performance I might get is not worth it for me to spend the extra money on an extra 500GB HDD and a dual-bay enclosure?

[SubTract]

You would get an increase, but I don't think it would be worth it. Not for an external drive. From what I read that LaCie Drive only got that sort of performance from Thunderbolt. It would be cool if USB was better than it is but it relies to much on the CPU.

I just read my comment from before and I wrote it "wouldn't make any difference" My bad. It would make a difference just not as much as one would hope for.

Why do you need so much performance from an external, why not just plug it into your mobo and use it on Sata?

Raid 0 Much like Crossfire or SLI won't give you 100% performance increase it can give you big performance boosts of sometimes over 90% and because its more "mature" than Crossfire and SLI it is a much better technology. It also scales well over more than 2 drives unlike crossfire/SLI not the greatest comparison but it makes the point.

[Makaseo]

You would get an increase, but I don't think it would be worth it. Not for an external drive. From what I read that LaCie Drive only got that sort of performance from Thunderbolt. It would be cool if USB was better than it is but it relies to much on the CPU.

I just read my comment from before and I wrote it "wouldn't make any difference" My bad. It would make a difference just not as much as one would hope for.

Why do you need so much performance from an external, why not just plug it into your mobo and use it on Sata?

Raid 0 Much like Crossfire or SLI won't give you 100% performance increase it can give you big performance boosts of sometimes over 90% and because its more "mature" than Crossfire and SLI it is a much better technology. It also scales well over more than 2 drives unlike crossfire/SLI not the greatest comparison but it makes the point.

Gotcha. The reason I don't plug it into a mobo is because I was thinking of using these old drives for my laptop.

​You've been a great help, thanks a bunch!

[SubTract]

I would suggest if you're going to set up multiple drives in raid go with a raid 1 or 5 for rendundancy rather than a 0 for performance.