What is the best home Raid 1 drive?

Caldigit might do the trick.

http://www.caldigit.com/FireWireVR.asp

good price through LA Computer.

http://www.lacomputercompany.com/cg...=search&search=caldigit&submit.x=0&submit.y=0

could you explain RAID?

I know it has something to do with arrays, and mulitiple HD connected together - but could you explain to a nontechie whether this makes sense for personal storage? Like most people, I'm accumulating lots of digital images and music and clones that fill up drives, and I've got 3 externals already.

I've read about Drobo, which seems to offer an alternative that some say is an improvement over RAID. Any thoughts? Thanks.

macpluslaptop said:

I know it has something to do with arrays, and mulitiple HD connected together - but could you explain to a nontechie whether this makes sense for personal storage? Like most people, I'm accumulating lots of digital images and music and clones that fill up drives, and I've got 3 externals already.

I've read about Drobo, which seems to offer an alternative that some say is an improvement over RAID. Any thoughts? Thanks.

Click to expand...

RAID = Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. See the Wikipedia entry.

In short, why you want this for personal storage is for redundancy; If you've ever had a hard drive fail, you don't need a "backup," but instead have an automatic backup already in place and you only need to replace the faulty drive.

Of course there are other types of RAID that don't offer protection, but their offerings are creating a larger volume out of smaller drives (i.e., a 2 TB "volume" from 4 (inexpensive) 500GB drives. Doing so in hardware (as opposed to software) can also give you nifty things like increased drive read/write performance; You're getting data from multiple sources simultaneously, much like how BitTorrent gets parts from various sources (This isn't a perfect analogy, but it works).

So, why do we use it for personal storage? Because we're nuts about our data, and some are nuts about performance.

I personally use a RAID 5 solution with four 400GB drives. The result is I have a 1.2 TB 'drive' and any one of those drives can literally blow up; If the other 3 are still running, I still have 100% of my data.

fcbr10 said:

Which would be better? The Guardian MAXimus
http://www.newertech.com/products/gmax.php

or the CalDigit FireWireVR
http://www.CalDigit.com/FireWireVR.asp

Click to expand...

The Guardian only does RAID-1. You can't configure it to another RAID type.

At least the CalDigit can be configured as RAID-0, RAID-1, or JBOD.

Whatever the case, you'll save yourself some cash if you buy the enclosure empty and get the drives somewhere else. Just make sure that you're buying drives that the enclosure manufacturer lists as supported.