mac.iLounge

We’ve seen plenty of external hard drives for Macs over the years, and while they look different from one another, they tend to have pretty similar features. Sonnet decided to do something different with its new Fusion F2QR ($569): it’s offering a RAID array in a truly portable package. There are actually two 1TB drives in this 5.9” x 6.1” x 0.95” aluminum case, capable of supporting four different storage configurations. The price isn’t cheap, but there’s definitely value in a redundant backup solution that you can carry anywhere.

The simple enclosure is a thick-walled aluminum box roughly the size of two CD jewel cases. Each drive inside is shock-isolated to protect it when you’re carrying Fusion F2QR around on the road. There are plenty of connection options too: eSATA, twin FireWire 800 ports, and even a USB 2.0 port—and all the cables are included. Sonnet’s hardware supports RAID 0, RAID 1, concatenated, and JBOD standards, with sustained speeds of up to 160MB/sec reading with 110MB/sec writing in RAID 0 mode, or 85MB/83MB in RAID 1 mode. While Fusion F2QR’s concept isn’t going to appeal to everyone, we’d imagine some folks out there are already getting their wallets out for this small, fast RAID solution.