Storage maven
inXtron adds to its line of USB 3.0 devices with the Orbit. Not to be confused with the
Altec Lansing Orbit speaker, this Orbit is a 2.5 hard drive enclosure built for two 2.5" drives. They've developed this closely with Gigabyte, who is leading the way with many USB 3.0 implementations; and Silicon Image who is providing its SteelVine Series 3 Core storage technology. These drives can be configured to run in RAID configurations 0 and 1 as well as JBOD. RAID 1 mirroring is an ideal use for this device as a great method to handle drive failures for critical data. Unfortunately, even the best
RAID 1 device sacrifices speed for security. Duplicating the data across disks is done real-time and can effectively take twice as long as normal.
RAID 0 is where this drive will really smoke. The USB 3.0 bandwidth can really be exploited with the dual write, striping operations permitted by RAID 0.
USB 3.0 should provide plenty of power to be able to run both drives solely with bus power. There's not much more detail at this time so release may be far off. Hopefully no more than a few months will pass before we can get our hands on one.
