To be perfectly honest, I had never heard of Sans Digital before. I guess I just haven't been in the market for enterprise storage solutions, other than the stuff offered by our server manufacturers. But it seems recently SD has expanded into the home marketplace, in part thanks to a North American distribution agreement with Synology, maker of various consumer grade network storage/server products. They have also been in the news lately about incorporating Silicon Image (SIL) raid hardware in many of their new products.

Today I have one of those newer enclosures for review, the MobileSTOR MS2UTN+. Utilizing the SIL 5744 chipset, the MobileSTOR offers the typical dual drive configurations such as JBOD, Spanning (BIG), RAID0 and RAID1, but also something new I haven't seen before, SAFE33 and SAFE50. These new formats split the drives into two volumes, one RAID1 and one Span set. The result is that either 1/3 or 1/2 of the total drive capacity is mirrored for data protection and the rest is combined for non-protected, high-capacity storage.


The MobileSTOR MS2UTN+ is a DAS (Directly Attached Storage) solution that utilizes inexpensive SATA or SATA-II hard drives and either a USB or eSATA interface with the host computer. It works with either PC or MAC and is a two bay device with locking quick-change drive trays and cooling fan, available in either silver or black finish.

Join me as I take a closer look at the MobileSTOR MS2UTN+.