Silicon Image treats two S-ATA drives as one

The latest Sil5744 comes with integrated eSATA and USB 2.0 interfaces, but the unique feature of this controller is the fact that it contains the logic that will treat two hard drives as a single entity.

The use of the controller is twice-fold: you can get an external eSATA controller for notebooks, which enables you to daisy-chain hard drives in external enclosures without all those drive letters, or use two hard drives stacked together in a JBOD/RAID arrays.

The idea of drive stacking is putting two 2.5" hard drives into a single enclosure and offering users a choice between JBOD, RAID0/1 and two new modes - SAFE33 and SAFE50.

Both 33 and 50 are nothing more but a dual RAID array on two drives, 33 per cent or 50 per cent being placed in RAID1 array for important data, and the rest is joined in RAID0 for fastest possible access to your everyday data, such as Internet downloads, say YouTube movies, and similar temp files.

SiliconImage partnered with PDE Technology to make the dual hard drive enclosure. µ