External Drive(s) - RAID? (Mac OS X)

[PlaneNuts]

Hi all,

Looking at beefing up my external drive storage. I currently have a Western Digital 500GB My Book drive. So far no issues, but I need something larger.

In the interest of not losing all my picture files from a drive crash, I'm looking at the latest models with RAID 1 support.

Anyone using these? Recommendations for a Mac?

thanks!

[srwatters]

Please do yourself a favor and really understand what the different RAID configurations give you in terms of 'protection'. RAID will only save you if you have a physical drive failure. If you have an 'accident' and delete the wrong thing or copy over something, it isn't going to save anything. That's what back-ups are for.

RAID - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[PlaneNuts]

I completely understand the differences, but thank you for the reference anyhow. :)

[engstrom]

If you can swing the price the Drobo and Drobo S are the external drives that I lust after.

[GadgetVirtuoso]

Not a MAC user but this kind of thing isn't a MAC or PC question. I recently setup a 1.5TB RAID 1 in our home server. I would have done RAID 10 but that wasn't in my budget. With all the sales this Black Friday and Cyber Monday its a good time to do it. 1.5TB drives are going for less than $100. Be sure to buy at least 7200 RPM drives. As for the RAID card you want a HW RAID solution for best performance. The RAID card should also support SATA II for 3Gb/s vs SATA I at 1.5Gb/s. Some cards only have one internal SATA port so you'll want one with at least 2 unless you buy a splitter but that will degrade performance a little.

I bought a Roswell card and it has been working well for a couple months now.

Newegg.com - Computer Hardware,Hard Drives,Controllers / RAID Cards,MAC

[piper]

The thing is sometimes raid one is not even a good backup plan, remember raid is not a backup technology, it provides hot swap only. I used to think having raid is safer for my data, which I was totally wrong, I had a raid 1 combo and my drives did not died but my raid controller did, which at the end causes my data to be inaccessible. I think using cloud storage as backup such as Amazon S3 is more reliable than having raid

[GadgetVirtuoso]

You're right about that, no solution meets all disaster recovery needs. RAID is one good option for disk failure. A backup of some kind is still necessary. I've got allmydata running on our home server. Mozy is another great option.

[johnastovall]

Take a look Drobo.

For other Mac options...

[PlaneNuts]

Originally Posted by piper

The thing is sometimes raid one is not even a good backup plan, remember raid is not a backup technology, it provides hot swap only. I used to think having raid is safer for my data, which I was totally wrong, I had a raid 1 combo and my drives did not died but my raid controller did, which at the end causes my data to be inaccessible. I think using cloud storage as backup such as Amazon S3 is more reliable than having raid

Couldn't you place your drives in another enclosure from the same manufacturer? Or did the dying RAID controller corrupt the data?

[mike.irwin]

do your research, alot of solutions will offer raid protection for disk failure, but there is a raid chip there that actually stores your volume information, and there fore has introduced a single point of failure into your setup, and if the raid chip flames out there are models out there that you cant just buy another enclosure and have it recognize the volumes on your drives. just be aware of that. personally, i think two 1TB hard drives in your main system, one for data, and one for backup, and an online backup service that cost $5/month like Online Backup from Backblaze is the best way to go. raiding in my opinion, especially raid1 is not much protection form anything other than drive flameout. if you delete a file, its deleted on the mirror. if your OS corrupts a filesystem both drives are now useless, so there's that to keep in mind.