Axus FiT 300
Nov 17th, 2009 | By Simon
Setting up the FiT 300 is fairly simple. The first step would be to mount the hard drives to the cages and slide them into the bays. For our tests we will be using 500GB Seagate ST3500320AS drives.
Once that is complete, the next step is to plug everything in at the back. It’s completely optional if you want to use the auxiliary fan, but I would recommend it. Three hard drives can product a fair amount of heat and the fan will provide some well deserved cooling. The fan is clipped in and only takes 5 seconds to install. Depending on your computer, you may wish to use the FiT 300 with your USB port or eSATA. Axus realizes that not every motherboard will have eSATA ports on the rear I/O panel so they’ve included an adapter to use a free internal SATA port.
Now that the FiT 300 has power and can communicate with your PC, it’s time to determine how you want to drives to be configured. If you decide to use the rotary dial, select the setting you want, press and hold the Select/Mute/Backup button and turn on the device. After a few seconds you can let go of the Select/Mute/Backup button and the device will begin to configure itself. For those who wish to use the GUI, grab hold of the CD and we’ll walk through the installation and configuration process.
The CD provides the Axus FiT Manager software.
The FiT Manager provides basic information of the device: Drive information, warning options, firmware data. It unfortunately does not have the ability to grab SMART data off the drive.
The steps required to configure drives are simple. Navigate to the Basic RAID configuration page, select which RAID configuration you want and create. After a few minutes the configuration will be set.
Regardless of which configuration method you use, GUI or Rotary dial, you’re not done yet. Like every new hard drive installed, you need to initialize and format the disk before you can use it. Formatting 1.5TB actually takes some time so grab a drink and chill out while your O/S does its job.
Now that the FiT 300 has been complete configured and it ready to use, let’s get to the benchmarking!