This Verbatim external drive came in our test lab in usual sample package: big brown cardboard box. Of course retail packaging will be much better and if you never saw packaging of an Verbatim storage device you can find some at product homepage at the end of this review. Inside the box you will find a manual (19 languages), device itself, cables and power adapter. External drive is designed in monolithic fashion with rounded edges. Basically it looks like a fancy black brick. After quick inspection of back side it became obvious that this drive can be connected to PC via USB and eSATA standard. Obviously USB and eSATA cables are present in the packaging but the problem are their lengths: eSATA cable is 65cm long while USB cable is 60cm long. In case you plan to place Verbatim 2-Disk External Hard Drive on top of your chassis there will be no problems but for placing it on a working desk, cables will be, in most cases, few centimeters short. Beside USB and eSATA connectors, at the back are also present power socket, power button and a switch (about the last one a little bit latter).

Verbatim 2-Disk RAID External Hard Drive has two 1TB HDDs inside. Of course, identical HDDs (7200RPM, 16MB cache). Device can be set in tree modes: RAID-0, RAID-1 and BIG. All you have to do is set the corresponding, already mentioned, switch located at the back and you are ready to go. Of course device should be powered off when operating the mode switch. Everything else is done by internal RAID controller and firmware. Switching from one mode to other will result in data loss, so backup is required.

In RAID-0 mode real capacity of this drive is 1.81TB with all benefits in speed that came with RAID-0. In this mode data is stored on both disks evenly and at the same time so write speed is almost doubled and drive acts as one big drive. On the other side RAID-1 mode allows maximum protection for your data since same data is written on both disks. So, if one disk develops some sort of failure you always have same data on the other. In this scenario drive will be also registered by OS as one drive with 931GB in capacity. Question is: What does BIG mode do? In this mode RAID controller inside makes one big virtual drive out of both disks but data is stored first on one disk, and when it gets full, on the second disk. Capacity of that drive is also 1.81TB. If you take a look at HDTach graph you will notice a drop at the half of the test that corresponds to moment when data begun to be stored on second HDD. This mode is very similar to RAID-0, specially since no one mentioned that half of your data can be saved if one of HDDs gets “broken” in BIG mode. Another interesting detail concerning BIG mode is high CPU load on a well overclocked quad-core system. Why this occurred we don’t know. Verbatim 2-Disk RAID External Hard Drive is by default set at BIG mode and FAT32 pre-formatted. On drive is present Nero BackIT UP 2 software along with Smart Disk FAT32 format utility that can be used to create FAT32 partition.