Introduction

You may have noticed that nearly all of the exciting hard drives in the last year have been 2.5 inch drives. The 2.5 inch standard has long dominated the notebook market and is quickly starting to take over the enterprise server market. When Western Digital released the VelociRaptor analysts took notice as it marked the 2.5" invasion into desktop systems. Here we are a year later and solid state drives are all the rage. I know several enthusiasts that are using SSDs in their full towers, most of them with multiple drives in either RAID 0 or RAID 5.

Other than rack mounted servers I have yet to see a desktop system come with an efficient 2.5" mounting system for these drives. Several companies make adapters but most were designed to fit a floppy disk drive into a 5.25" CDROM bay. Vizo has noticed this same issue and decided to do something about it.

The Vizo Ares II is a dual 2.5" SATA drive system that will allow you to install two "notebook" style drives into a standard 3.5" floppy drive bay. The system is a little smaller than a traditional desktop hard drive but it does have the same screw locations, so if it really came down to it you could use the Ares II in your traditional HDD bay. Let's get a closer look.