Use two 2.5-inch SATA drives in a single 3.5-inch SATA drive bay with RAID support for PC and NASThe QDA-A2AR can accommodate two 2.5-inch SATA drives within a single 3.5-inch SATA drive bay. No software driver is required for the QDA-A2AR, and it can be installed in a PC/workstation (Windows®, Linux®) or QNAP NAS to flexibly add additional hard drives or SSDs to meet various storage needs.Supports various RAID levelsThe QDA-A2AR supports a variety of RAID configurations. Depending on your requirements, you can use the bundled metal pin as disk mode switch tool to select your ideal RAID mode: Individual, JBOD, RAID 0, or RAID 1. Windows® users can use the QNAP External RAID Manager utility to view the RAID group status and disk health information.Individual ModeA PC that supports SATA port multipliers can connect two SATA drives to a single SATA port, allowing you to independently access each disk as separate storage space.RAID 1 Mode (Default)Half of the total storage capacity is used to store data, and the other half keeps a copy of this data. This provides high data protection at the cost of only being able to use half the installed storage space.RAID 0 ModeData is split amongst the drives. RAID 0 provides the fastest performance but does not protect data from drive failure.JBOD ModeAll the drives are recognized as a single drive. This allows maximal storage utilization but provides no data protection.Install in a PC/workstation for higher performance or data protectionWhen using two 2.5-inch drives instead of a single 3.5-inch drive in a PC/workstation (Windows® or Linux®) you can create a RAID 0 for enhanced performance, or RAID 1 to add data redundancy for greater data protection. To deal with tasks that require intensive, fast data transmission, you can install high-speed SATA SSDs to achieve maximized performance and lower latency, ideal for on-the-fly video editing and server-grade applications.External RAID Manager for Windows usersThe QNAP External RAID Manager utility allows Windows® users to view the drive status and RAID information of the QDA-A2AR. Firmware updates for the QDA-A2AR can also be managed with the External RAID Manager utility.Install in QNAP NAS for efficient storage or SSD cachingThe QDA-A2AR supports hardware RAID that will not consume CPU resources to help sustain optimal NAS performance. You can install one or more QDA-A2AR in a NAS to maximize the storage utilization of 3.5-inch drive bays. The QDA-A2AR can accommodate two SSDs to create an SSD volume for performance-demanding workflows or work in an efficient tiered-storage environment with Qtier. It can also boost IOPS performance when configuring SSD caching. RAID information and drive health of the QDA-A2AR can be monitored through the QTS Storage & Snapshots Manager.