Review on Fantom Drives DMR000E - FD Duo Portable 2-Bay SSD RAID Enclosure - 💽 USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C - 10Gbps - RAID0/RAID1/JBOD - Aluminum - Mac/PC/PS4/Xbox Compatible by Jill Bell

Here is my review of this amazing device in the first 24 hours of use. This is "FD Duo SSD Portable 2 Bay RAID - USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C - 10Gb/s - RAID0/RAID1/JBOD - Aluminum - Compatible with Mac/PC/PS4/Xbox (DMR2000S) by Fantom Drives" sold by fantom . hard drives. QUALITY UNPACK AND SET UP The incredibly heavy little box was easy to unpack and carefully fold. The box is small and easy to remove for later use. The device itself is heavy (in a good way) and very well housed in an extremely durable black metal body with nice, slightly rounded edges. The little "grid" on the front looks great too and is all very modest without being noticeable. The only thing that was a bit ugly was the serial number sticker that Fantom put on the side of the case; It should have been downstairs in my opinion. The power supply inside the box accounted for about half of the box's total weight in my hand, although I'm sure that's not entirely true. So when you pick up the box for the first time, don't worry that the RAID drive will be so heavy. Show selected RAID level. There is also a fold-out instruction card at the bottom of the box; I suggest you read it before hooking it up: it contains the necessary information to set up the RAID level you want (more on that below). POWER I didn't need the AC adapter at all with my MacBook Pro 15" device via the USB-C port. When I plugged in the AC adapter I didn't notice a difference, so no AC adapter required. A big plus in my book Mac that Drive showed up as a 2TB drive (in RAID 0 mode) Disk Utility doesn't see the internal drives as SSDs, but that doesn't matter The RAID was formatted for a Windows PC as NTFS The SSDs themselves I believe , my unit came with two SanDisk SD8SB8U-1T00-2000 drives (perhaps also known as SanDisk "X400") which are different from the drives you find in the same unit sold on the Fantom drives website, which comes with Western Digital "Blue” SSD This could explain the big difference in price ($348.65 at Fantom vs. $289.85 I paid through Revain) The instructions clearly state that you need the pens e and then press "Reset" on the case. What I was missing was that (on a Mac at least) you **should** have a drive connected and working when you click "Reset". This went completely against my instincts as I would have thought resetting a connected drive was a bad idea. However, the Finder just comes up and says the drive needs to be initialized, which I did with the "Erase" option in Disk Utility, setting the drive as old-style "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" with a GUID partition map have. which then gave me a 1TB RAID as expected. NEW DISK SPEED TEST The BlackmagicDesign Disk Speed test (using a 4GB test setup) found that the original RAID 0 (2TB) configuration had a write speed of 806MB/s or faster and a read speed of 857.7MB /s or faster had . It's great and as advertised. With the device configured for RAID 1 (1TB size) and without my files on it, the write speed was 477.7MB/s and the read speed was 515.3MB/s, which is also excellent and much faster than I expected! the new RAID 1 (1 TB) configuration works immediately. I copied 92,787 files (422.6GB) using the Finder from a Samsung T5 500GB SSD to a Fantom Drive Duo (as above) with a 15" MacBook Pro on the network. 4.24GB of images - 3363 16.89GB of audio files - 72GB of FinalCut Pro libraries - 2GB of photo library - 40GB of virtual machine... and a bunch of other stuff (it took 34 seconds to copy). I think I would literally spend hours staring at my screen if they were old spinning disc drives, so I'm pretty happy with that performance. sat for almost 24 hours (to make sure Spotlight and other processes completed), the Blackmagic test showed 287.7 MB/s writing and 522.5 MB/s reading, dropping write speeds to about 60% of those the disk went empty. , and the reading was equal or better. But I am very satisfied with the performance! I think the drop in write speed can only affect those working with very high bandwidth video files that use the Fantom as a drive for real-time editing. For normal storage, I find these speeds more than acceptable. (For comparison, my standard 500GB Samsung T5 small drive with *exactly* the same set of files on it has 487.2 MB/s writing and 521.2 MB/s reading, tested with the same speed test after a few moments after the Fantom test.) SLEEP My Mac went through several sleep-wake cycles with the power off, and I'm happy to report no issues with the Fantom drive being unplugged or my MBP battery draining. That is good news! The LEDs went out except for a dotted blue LED on the back which gave my office a small blue glow at night. You can glue it easily when complete darkness is required. HARDWARE USEDMacBook Pro 15" Late 2018 Vega 20 Model with 32GB RAM All drive connections are via USB-C with high quality, thick, shielded cables. Applications that consume a lot of CPU time. I hope this helps someone. In general I have no "cons" just "pluses" for this device Disclosure: I'm not a paid reviewer, I write *very* few reviews and only do so for products I genuinely appreciate and use with my own bought money.