The Tsunami Ultimate II 3500 enclosure is capable of mounting two 3.5” SATA HDD's so that's what I did, putting a pair of brand new Samsung Spinpoint F3 1Tb drives in there for testing.
I decided to use these drives as all the other drives I had were far older and wouldn't necessarily stretch the USB2 interface to it's limits – whereas these F3's will do that with absolute ease and should therefore be a good test for the enclosure and the controller.
Once the cover has been removed (two small screws underneath) you get your first sight of the very tidy internals, with perfectly sized cables. There are two little bundles of cables neatly tucked away which run to led's mounted just behind the front fascia for power and drive activity. The metal sides are slightly sprung – you can see the bottom one in the pic above bending in a bit, which makes for a very snug mounting when you put the first drive in!
Getting the first drive in was pretty easy and the included screws fit perfectly into the recess provided by the metal frame – if you were to lose these screws then you'd probably be fine with any standard HDD mounting screws as the recess is pretty big.
Installing the second drive is a little tricky though due to the strong grip of those sprung sides – I found that to get the HDD's screw holes lined up with the recesses on the enclosure's sides it was easier to take the fascia panel off so I could adjust the height of the drive more easily... you have been warned! Once in however, everything feels very snug and there is absolutely no movement anywhere, just as it should be!
When powered up you get a blue led to the left (or bottom depending on your choice of mounting) which indicates power, and to the right as above a green led indicates activity on HDD 2 (for activity on HDD 1 the right led turns blue).
When switching between JBOD and BIG modes you will need to shut down the enclosure and move the selector switch on the rear panel to the required mode before restarting the unit. On restart you should go into your computer's management console and then into Disk Management to initialise the Disk before formatting and assinging a drive letter etc – the included user manual is rather good on this with clear instructions for those who haven't delved into this side of things before!
The included CD-Rom has all sorts of software on it, a lot of which is not pertinant to this device and the folder structure leaves a little to be desired too! There is no auto-run installer telling you what you can install, rather it is left to the user to browse the CD and decide what to install – which could be a bit hit and miss! Unfortunately for me the included 'One-Touch-Backup' software simply didn't want to run on Windows 7 no matter what compatability settings I tried. Some may find this software useful, I suspect that most will simply use either Windows Explorer or an alternate to control the content on the disks.
