The installation CD contains user manuals and a program called Backup Master branded under the Thermaltake name. The software is very basic and easy to use. You have a choice of either incremental or full backups and can schedule the jobs or run them manually. Unfortunately, the program doesn't handle open files very well but this is fixed by simply deselecting certain files/folders (such as the Windows\system32 directory) from the backup list.

I am using two Seagate 7200.9 SATA hard drives for testing, each with 16MB cache buffer and the newer SATA 3.0Gb interface. The BIG or Linear mode performance is going to depend on the drive you use, but in the case of eSATA you should see transfer speeds on par with what you would get using the drive connected internally within the system. What I was primarily interested in is the Muse R-Duo's RAID performance, in both striping and mirroring configurations. I'm using HD Tune to measure average throughput, and the size of the drive indicates the RAID level, 600GB for RAID0 and 300GB for RAID1. First I'll test using the USB 2.0 connection.



As you can see, the performance benefit of RAID0 is lost when connecting the Muse R-Duo via USB. It manages only 1MB/s better throughput over the RAID1 mirror, certainly not enough of an increase to warrant the extra risk involved with using a stripe set. Now let's compare using the eSATA connection.



There is a huge difference here. The RAID0 configuration averages nearly double the performance of the RAID1 mirror, 96MB/s vs. 53MB/s. One thing I did notice while using the drives in RAID1 is that disk activity on only one drive at a time. In either read or write operations, the drives were never accessed together, therefore performance is most likely less than what could be achieved operating either drive in a single, standalone mode. No such problem when striping; both drives showed simultaneous disk access and the performance reflects that.

On to final thoughts and conclusion.