I was the OP on this subject, but was out of town for a while so
didn't get a chance to respond. It's been interesting reading
everyone's responses. I think I can safely say that I don't need a
RAID, I just need to regularly back-up my files so I am going to go
with two individual drives.
As I stated, I currently have all Lacie drives, but they are more
expensive than Western Digital. It's tempting just to go with Lacie
again due to familiarity and also tempting to go with a cheaper
alternative. Is it the case that Lacie is basically just an enclosure
and that the actual drive can be any number of different
manufacturers? In that case it seems like a waste to pay more for
Lacie. I know that all drives have a risk of failure, so does the
brand really matter at all?Does anyone have specific recommendations
or opinions?
Thanks,
Julie
On 10 May 2009, at 18:22, Tom Piwowar wrote:
On last week's show, one of the guys recommended a DROBO for external
hard drive storage . I looked into it and I think this might be
overkill for what I need, plus the up front cost is too high for me
Those guys are not "the guys." I find those guys quite distressing.
DROBO is a terrible recommendation and demonstrates the person's
cluelessness. It didn't take you long to figure this out for
yourself. I
hope this recommendation is just due to cluelessness and not an
attempt
to push something they are selling.
I think I just want to have a RAID 1 (mirrored RAID) setup to back-up
my photo archive.
Bad idea. This arrangement will protect you against the least
likely type
of problem (drive failure) and will merely replicate the most likely
types of problems (soft failures) onto both drives.
Is there any advantage to getting this kind of set up rather than two
individual 1 TB drives that I set up in a RAID 1 configuration myself
like I've done in the past?
Get 2 individual drives, but do not set them up as RAID. Instead run a
backup program to sync up the two drives periodiclly. This will
insulate
the second drive from some types of soft errors.
Better than syncing is to run TimeMachine, because it will protect you
against more types of soft failures. For example if you accidently
delete
files or if files become corrupted TimeMachine will let you go back to
previous versions to replace them. If you go with TimeMachine the
backup
drive should be about twice as large as the primary drive.
Running the backup once a day usually works, but you could run it much
more often if necessary. TimeMachine runs hourly by default.
Lastly, after many years of reliable use, one of my old Lacie drives
has failed. I have the other half of the RAID as backup. I'd like to
rebuild the RAID and was wondering if I could just open up the
enclosure with the bad drive and replace it. Is that a bad idea or is
it pretty straightforward and easy to do?
With most RAIDs you have to match the two drives quite closely.
That is
why old, obsolete drives are often sold at such crazy high prices. It
might be safer to just copy your files to the new drive and get a
fresh
start.
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