Cavalry Storage CADA-U32A Series 2 TB USB 2-bay RAID Personal Disk Array CADA002U32A
- USB 2.0 (USB 1.1 backwards compatible)
- Plug and play for Windows 2000 and newer (pre-formatted to NTFS), preconfigured to RAID 1 (mirrored, total usable capacity is halved in RAID 1)
- Configurable to RAID 0 and 1
- Unit Includes - One (1) year manufacturer's warranty, two (2) 1 TB 3.5-inch hard drives installed in a dual bay enclosure with built-in fan, USB cable, AC adapter, Resources CD and Quick Start Guide
- System Requirements - Available USB port, Mac OS 9.x or newer, Windows 98SE / Me / 2000 / XP / Vista
Product Description
When your computer is your life, why take the risk of losing memories? Get automatic backup in one elegant package: The CADA-U32 Series offers an unbeatable combination of RAID data protection, a vast storage capacity of 2 TB (1 TB mirrored), and ease of use. This dual-bay drive features swappable hard disks and a built-in RAID chipset controller and arrives preconfigured in RAID 1 to protect your important data - if one drive fails, replace it with an identical dri... More >>
I have purchased a large number of hard drives, for things like Tivo extenders, computer backups, etc. They all vary in terms of performance, price, but the one thing that sets the Cavalry apart is how noisy the thing is. The fan(s) are always on whether the unit is being accessed or not, no low power or standby mode. On the plus side, it does have a nice footprint, and the cost seems reasonable given the size of the disks. I can’t speak for the performance as it is attached to my router’s USB port as a networked disk. Had I known the noise level I would not have made the purchase.
Rating: 2 / 5
I have purchased dozens of hard drives over the years – including raid devices. Finally – a perfect device – on all fronts
1- Simple to get up and running
2- RAID mode is simple to setup and use – I use RAID 1 to keep an extra copy of all files
3- Quiet operation – super quiet!
4- Price is amazing – It would be a great price for just 1TB – but you are getting 2 TB
5-Fast operation – I have it plugged into a shared device on my (Apple) wireless network – and access time from remote machines is fast – almost as fast as if it were connected directly to my laptop. READ and WRITE are fast.
Rating: 5 / 5
Be warned that this drive is definitely not plug-n-play with Windows XP. It did come configured for 1TB RAID-1, but Windows XP (two different computers) would not recognize it. What’s wrong is that it is not partitioned for Windows, so the customer needs to initialize one or more NTFS partitions. Tools for that are available in Windows, but definitely not recommended for the casual user. Note also that the user manual suffers from severe translation problems, so if you will need to reconfigure the RAID level, and have never done this before, good luck. Now that I’ve done the factory’s work for them, the gear does seem to work properly and is fairly quiet.
Rating: 2 / 5
I have tried many external hard drives as extra storage for massive quantities of photographs (professional photographer) and web-based projects including videos, documents, etc. This particular Cavalry 2TB external hard drive is flawless, instantaneously recognized and operable as plug-n-play, and easily modified for various JBOD and RAID formats. Far, Far, Far Better than the Western Digital My Book series (noisy, disc failures, awkward installations, and system lockups) and Iomega (lower quality housing, higher prices for lower storage capacity, two of six disc failures).
Do not hesitate on this CADA-U32A series . . . Excellent case quality, ease of use, high storage/lower cost, plug-n-play, silent, easily modifiable settings via jumpers.
Rating: 5 / 5