In my never ending quest for backups of backups on a never ending array of external drives I invested in what seemed like just the ticket. It was a 4 bay external RAID system with full RAID features. That means a lot to video and computer artists. We use LOTS of drive space. In my most recent film there were 4.5 terabytes of footage. Not gigabytes, but TERAbytes.  Working with the footage in real time requires a fast drive or at least 4 drives striped as RAID O(zero). In the case of four exactly the same drives striped as RAID O (zero) the drives would each multiply their actual speed. The four 7200 RPM drives would be 4 times faster because the RAID makes them look like one big drive to the computer.

So I already own a Burley Drive RAID system with a 4.5TB capacity at a price of almost $4,000. But I don’t have a way to back it up. So I saw the Avolusion RG4UE-B Quad Bay eSATA system at $215 without drives and I had to have it. The specs looked fine:

They said I could mount up to a 1.5TB drive in each bay. That would give me about 5.5TB formatted.

Way cool! And with 1.5TB drives at $139 each the whole setup would cost $771 since shipping was free. Wow, I thought, I paid $4K for a 4.5TB eSATA RAID array just a year ago, prices have come down a bunch, now a 6TB array was $771!

 Not so fast cowboy. The system will not work on any 32 bit operating system, just 64 bit systems. That means in an office of 6 computers only my Mac Pro 8-core will run this RAID. The Mac had an eSATA card installed, so it should be plug and play, right?  Nope. The new Avolusion system will only run using their own branded eSATA card and not my CalDigit high end card. You can’t use USB connections on partitions larger than 2TB, so the only way it will work is eSATA. Their eSATA at that. Guess what? My existing RAID will not work with THEIR eSATA card, so there is no way for me to use the Avolusion RAID as a backup.

So, you can use this RAID box in RAID 1 (one) mirrored setup with a max of 1TB for each drive on any computer. You can also have two RAID striped O (zero) drives of 2TB each. But you can NOT do anything larger then 2TB in a 32 bit operating system like Vista 32bit or XP 32 bit.  BTW: Many software programs do NOT run on 64 bit Windows XP or Vista.

Thumbs down - NO STARS on this silly device. Don’t waste your money. Oh, and tech support is the WORST.