The Mercury Elite-AL Pro Dual-Drive USB 2.0 + USB 2.0 Powered Hub, 500GB to 2.0TB JBOD Performance Solutions, (Retail $169.99 - $439.99), are quite simply no-nonsense, workhorse, backup solutions to fit any budget and any system. This powered hub provides high performance, reliable storage for all of your audio/video, graphics, music, photography, and future TV show recordings, with fast data transfer rates of over 60MB per second. All units come with NovaStor NovaBACKUP® for Windows 2000 or later, which is a tried-and-true software package that has been helping millions of users recover from data loss and disasters for over 18 years. Feature rich, NovaBACKUP provides a powerful backup solution, with built-in support for hundreds of the most popular storage devices, and an easy to use step-by-step backup and restore wizard.

For the novice, let’s break down the first sentence of this review. The dual-drive means there are two 3.5” hard drive bays, meaning that you can have two separate hard drives inside this one box. The term JBOD stands for Just a Bunch of Disks. It is a technology where the controller pretends that these two hard drives are really just one hard drive. So, even though you have two physical hard drives, they only show up in your computer as one BIG logical hard drive, as shown below, when you click on Start/My Computer.

The USB 2.0 + USB 2.0 Powered Hub means that you simply plug in this device through one of your USB ports and this device provides you with three USB ports where you can plug in your other USB devices, like your keyboard, mouse, etc. While it has three USB ports for your use, one in the front, and two in the back, you only get a net gain of two USB ports because you had to sacrifice one of your USB ports to plug in this device. Now, on to the capacity.

Most users are pretty familiar with the acronym GB, which stands for GigaByte, one billion bytes (technically 1,073,741,824 bytes), a byte being roughly a character on the keyboard. The acronym TB, stands for TeraByte, one trillion bytes (technically 1,099,511,627,776 bytes). Now, that is a LOT of backup storage. Let’s look at this in pictorial form for a 1TB Mercury Elite-AL Pro Dual-Drive USB 2.0 + USB 2.0 Powered Hub, which was our test model. Using a typical 40GB system that the average small business or home user might be using, and assuming that they might have about 40% of their hard drive capacity used up, if you backup all of their business files, personal files, and system files to the 1TB hard drive and then check the properties of the 1TB Mercury Elite-AL Pro Dual-Drive, this is what you will see.

The blue sliver in the window above represents the space you used to back up all the files on your system. The pink space represents how much backup space, or active hard drive space you still have available to use. Now, you can see what I meant when I stated earlier, “that is a LOT of backup storage.”

The next question might come to mind, “why on earth would I ever need that much backup storage?” My answer would be, you can NEVER have enough backup storage. I can remember back in the late 1980s when people remarked, “why do I need a 40 MB hard drive?” Now, there are single programs that need 40MB just to load. A 20-minute digitized family movie can take well over 1GB on its own. Trust me, one day in the not too distant future, you may be adding another Mercury Elite-AL Pro Dual-Drive for extra capacity to support all of your fun activities of digitizing the old family videos, color slides, photos, documents, and doing other cool and fun things. With many systems becoming cable ready, where you can actually record TV shows directly on to your computer, it will take no time at all to fill your drive up with cool stuff you want to keep.

Key Features include:

*7200RPM or 5400RPM SATA drives for High Performance
*Cool Blue Activity Indicator LED!
*Shock Resistant Design
*Super Quiet Operation
*Large 32 or 64MB Data Cache
*U.S. / International 90 ~ 240v AutoSwitching
*JMICRON 20336 chipset
*USB 2.0 up to 480Mbps (60MB/s)
*USB 1.1 up to 12Mbps (1.5MB/s)
*(3) USB 2.0/1.1 Type A ports (2 rear, 1 front)
*(1) USB 2.0/1.1 Type B uplink port (rear)
*Three Year Solution Warranty

Software:

*Prosoft Engineering® Data Backup
*NovaBACKUP® Solution for Windows®
*Intech® Hard Disk SpeedTools Utilities™ OEM (For Mac OS 8.6 - X only)

System Requirements:

Macintosh® Requirements:

*USB 1.1: Apple OS 8.6 to 9.2.2
*USB 2.0: Apple OS X 10.2.x or later
*Available USB port on computer

Windows® Requirements:

*Windows ME, XP, 2000 (Home or Professional), or Vista
*Available USB port on computer