14 DAY TRIAL // While opting for an SSD instead of a mechanical hard drive will most surely offer a huge increase in performance, configuring two or more such drives in a RAID mode will offer even greater transfer speeds.
Therefore, Icy Dock designed a dual bay SSD RAID converter that makes this task a whole lot easier since it allows users to insert two 2.5-inch SATA SSDs into an enclosure that fits the exact form factor of a 3.5-inch SATA hard disk drive.
As a result the unit will fit everywhere a regular 3.5-inch drive fits, including hot swap mobile racks, and standard internal drive bays.
Furthermore, the unit doesn't require any tools in order to install the drives, a RAID controller being also enclosed inside the bay so users won't have to rely on an external RAID card or a motherboard.
Although details about the enclosed RAID controller are rather scarce (we only know this is built by JMicron), Icy Dock did provide us with a few performance numbers, the enclosure managing to achieve read speeds of 253.3MB/sec, and write speeds around 134.3MB/sec when a pair of Intel X25-M 80GB SSDs were installed.
Compared to using just one Intel X25-M 80GB SSD, which reached read speeds of 240.7MB/sec and write speeds of 82.2MB/sec in Icy Dock's internal tests, this setup managed to reach the SATA II maximum bandwidth while write speeds increased by over 75%.
In addition, if you are more interested in data security than in pure performance, the enclosure can also be run in RAID 1 mode, if a driver fails Icy Dock's, MB982SPR-2S enclosure automatically rebuilding the array.
As far as compatibility is concerned, apart from Intel's X25-M SSD line, Icy Dock states its enclosure also works with the Corsair P128, OCZ Agility 2, Kingston SSDNow V+ Series, ADATA S599, OCZ Vertex Series, although I don't see any reasons why the MB982SPR-2S wouldn't work with other 2.5-inch SSD drives.