Mapower MAP-TB32 Dual SATA RAID Enclosure

**Doctor Feelgood**

The primary method of connection should be via eSATA to take full advantage of its capabilities, as its below average USB 2.0 performance is disappointing. USB 2.0 gives you portability options should you need it, but I wouldn't recommend this enclosure for USB 2.0 only systems unless you need the data redundancy the RAID-1 configuration offers. - The Review

Dfreak · Rated PG Joined: 03 Dec 2008 Posts: 7

I want to buy this enclosure, but do you need 2 harddrives? Does it also work with just 1 HD? I want to test it with a drive that I already have, if I like the thing, I will buy a second drive.

I was also wondering if you could configure the enclosure so that you see 2 seperate drives in My Computer (if there are 2 drives installed inside the enclosure)?

Dfreak

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:50:14 Post Subject:

Hi... While I do know that it can see two installed drives separately, hopefully the reviewer will be around and can answer how it works with just one drive. I assume it would, but hopefully he can say for sure.

For two drives to be seen separately it just needs to be configured in "normal" mode.

acruxksa · Posted: Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:12:42 Post Subject:

I don't think I ever tested it with that configuration, although the documentation says it will work with a single drive, but give me about an hour and I'll let you know for sure. Just need to remove my raid drives and pop a different drive in.

acruxksa · Posted: Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:57:38 Post Subject:

I just checked and in "Normal" mode it does indeed work with one HDD. Please note that unless Mapower has changed things, the enclosure does not ship in this mode by default even though it's' called "Normal" mode, (ships in span mode) so you will need to consult the manual and set the jumpers accordingly. Also note that in Normal mode each disk is detected individually, but if your SATA controller does not provide a Port Multiplier you will only be able to see the first drive. It will still work with both drives in USB 2.0, but only the first drive will be visible via the eSATA connection.

Here's some info on port multipliers.
http://www.sata-io.org/portmultiplier.asp

This limitation only applies to the normal mode because as far as the SATA controller is concerned it's only one disk while in the other modes.

Hope that helps.

Dfreak · Rated PG Joined: 03 Dec 2008 Posts: 7

Ok, I ordered it, it's on it's way Grin

.
But the 1TB drive that I already have, will it be formatted? Because there's a lot of data on it. Confused

acruxksa · Posted: Mon, 08 Dec 2008 01:19:14 Post Subject:

That's another good question Dfreak, I know that if you install the disks in any of the raid modes you can lose your data, but I'm not sure about normal mode. I'll try to check on that first thing tomorrow, I'm right in the middle of a full system upgrade on my computer at the moment so things are a bit scattered around here.

I finished my upgrade and ran a quick test for you. I took my old boot drive and put it into my mapower enclosure, changed the jumpers to normal, turned it on and pushed the reconfigure button..................................... It took a second, but everything came up fine on the computer. In other words the drive wasn't erased when in normal mode. Please just make sure you double check your settings before you turn the enclosure on and press the configure button. I can't even imagine losing 1TB of data........How many blank DVD's you got? Grin

Dfreak · Rated PG Joined: 03 Dec 2008 Posts: 7

I have it now with 2 1TB harddrives installed. I configured the TB32 in SAFE50 mode. I hooked it al up and started to copy all data I can't afford to loose on the safe partition, al other data on the big partition. It copied all night long and when I woke up everything was done, all LED's were blue. I shutted the TB32 down and I booted it again a few hours later. Now I see the 2 volume's and everything works, but the middle LED is red with flashing blue: in the manual is that it's doing a disk rebuild. The bottom LED is red with blue (just HDD activity). Now, is this all normal, why does it have to do a disk rebuild? Confused

acruxksa · Posted: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 15:06:22 Post Subject:

It should only need to rebuild the disk once, but that rebuild takes a really long time. If everything is working, give it a bit of time and see what happens. It took several hours to build the partitions when I tested it with 250GB hard drives, so the TB drives will definitely take even longer. It appears you chose the safe50 mode rather than the normal mode like you originally mentioned. SAFE50 is a hybrid RAID mode that gives you both Raid 0 and Raid 1 partitions. It's the Raid 1 partitions that are being mirrored and initially they take forever. I believe the manual mentions that in this mode the disk will be usable, but that doesn't mean it's finished mirroring the data to the second drive. If you copied a lot of data before shutting it down, perhaps it didn't finish the mirror and when you powered it up again it started the mirroring operation again. I would just let it do it's thing for a day or so and it should finish.

Dfreak · Rated PG Joined: 03 Dec 2008 Posts: 7

Finally it's working Grin

!!! The problem was, the first time that all LED's were blue, I shutted it down. But after the TB32 did the rebuild it had to verify (the middle LED was purple instead of blue, it is not so clear the colors Mad

).

Jason and acruxksa, thanks for your help.

Greetings Dfreak