5. RAID and Feature Wrapup

RAID settings of the SSII (Figure 11) are also found under the Advanced menu. The spanning option is a form of RAID 0, which treats the two internal drives as one big drive. The second option, mirroring or RAID level 1, cuts the total capacity in half, but mirrors the data on both drives adding security in case of drive failure. Note that the SSII does not support JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) mode, which would let you access individual drives.

Figure 11: RAID Setup

One thing that confused me in this menu was the fact that the "next" button was selectable but it didn't do anything. I saw this behavior under both my Safari and my Firefox web browsers. However, IE showed the button as grayed out. This tells me Maxtor has some work to do in the web coding for this function.

To test out the mirroring behavior under failure conditions, I intended to open up the case, unhook cables from one drive and bring it back up. But when I went to open the case, I found it wasn't quite so easy. The case was evidently not intended to be opened by a consumer. The plastic sides and top were attached to an internal metal case with easily breakable plastic compression clips. After half an hour of trying to get it open, I gave up.

I think the only way I could have gotten into the case was by breaking the clips. This was a bit odd because besides increased read performance, one point of using RAID level 1 is being able to recover from disk failure. You open the case, replace the failed drive and let the RAID subsystem recover. But with the construction of the case the way it is, you'll end up breaking the case in order to replace the broken disk.

The final capability from the web interface that I explored was the "System Status" menu. This menu, shown in Figure 12, lists various settings and status from the device.

Figure 12: System Status

One thing I didn't see in any of the menus was a logging, or a notification feature. Many NAS devices email out warnings when errors occur or when the disk starts filling up, but the SSII has neither logging or notification capabilities.