Patriot PCXL25SR Convoy XL RAID Enclosure

Comment:
This drive can only be used on boards with port multiplier technology, cannot be used as a bootable drive, and is further restricted to external use on boards with nVidia chipsets. If you can connect it to a SATA-II port, you can reach 3GBps transfer rate, otherwise you will crawl at 480Mbps. These limitations are only apparent after you open the package, on page 3 of the manual. The One Button Backup function is proprietary to the 57xx SteelVine Manager program in the package which gives me an incompatability warning with Windows7. An ESATA Hard Drive Dock and external 3.5 inch RAID enclosure I own both give better performance than this enclosure, even if connected to the ESATA port, since 3.5 inch drives at least spin faster than 2.5 inch drives. I've relegated this product to backup duty as a hot-swappable enclosure for obsolete laptop 2.5 inch HDDs.

Comment:
I had two identical drives that were now each each too small. This was much cheaper than buying a single larger drive. Performed flawlessly straight out of the box.

Comment:
This item is a cool concept. It will not work with a 790 or 780 based board. I tried it on three systems at home all but one less than a year old and no love. I used 2 warp SSDs in it and with it in raid0 it was slower than a usb drive. The only system it worked well with had an Int Chip set, my others were 790 ultra. So if you have an Int chipset motherboard you should be fine. Make sure when you make this into raid0 or other raid you use Diskpart and aling your partitions on the stripe size you choose or your raid solution tanks speed wise.

Comment:
only if i did some homework... i bought the convoy regular enclosure then saw this unit. I could've bought the Xl version instead of buying two :). anyway.. the design is superb, awesome color and theme, brings me now to school and people start asking what it is :). oh well my ultra fast SSD in RAID 0!! anyway.. great product.. This is designed for internal and external, fits in a standard 3.5" case, but i have a 5.25" enclosure which is now hotswaping this unit as my boot and external drive. on the go, yank the unit out and bring the esata cable with me. again.. great product.. cost is not expensive compare to similiar products (if there is any.. )