The Zalman Docking Station:
In these pictures you can see everything that you will have to work with once you unwrap your MH200 U3. To the left of the drive bays you can see the two LED HDD access lights. They will let you know when your drive or drives are being accessed. To the right of the drive bays are the release buttons for the HDD’s, and with a gentle push down they will pop your drives free. On the back of the MH200 U3 you will find everything you need to work this device. You can easily turn on and off the MH200 U3, as well as configure your hard drives to run in any of the four modes: DUAL, JBOD, RAID 0 and RAID 1.
Installation:
Possible Modes and explanation of use:
- Dual: Each slot is recognized as an independent HDD.
- JBOD: Two HDD’s are combined and recognized as a single HDD drive.
- RAID 0: Data is striped into 2 HDDs for increased performance, but damage in 1 drive can cause total loss of data.
- RAID 1: By mirroring the same data in 2 HDDs, damage in 1 drive does not affect data in the other HDD.
Single Drives (DUAL Mode):
Installation of the actual drives was extremely easy. In fact, the drives went into place so effortlessly we were not sure if they were installed properly until we checked a few times. You can see in the above pictures how a 3.5″ and 2.5″ hard drive will look installed.
Once the hard drives were installed, we turned on the power to the Zalman MH200 U3. When Windows booted up we went into “device manager” to see if it recognized our drives. As you can see, it did right away!
The disk management panel in Windows 7 was our next destination once we finished checking device manager and needed to move onto initializing our drives for use. We got the above screen shot immediately when we clicked on disk management. From here you can select what disk you would like to initialize, as well as selecting a master boot record or just a normal partition. We chose GUID Partition Table for these tests.
When you have finished selecting your partition type the above screen will appear. At this point it will list every hard drive and jump drive in your system. Scroll down through the drives at the bottom and find the drives you just installed. Hint: they will be the drives in black which say “Unallocated” in the middle white space. You can right click on the drive, and from there, proceed to choose how you would like to format the drive. For these tests, we chose “New Simple Volume.”
Once you have decided on the above, you will be greeted with this screen as soon as you are finished. Both of our drives are initialized and ready to use.
Installing Raid 0:
We also decided to install Raid 0 for our testing. RAID 0 is very popular these days with most users, so we wanted to make sure that we showed how the Zalman MH200 U3 performs during those tests. Installation for the RAID setup is exactly like we discussed above for the DUAL mode installation, the only difference is that you need to switch the tabs on the back of the MH200 U3 to RAID 0 mode.
