I am looking for a 2 bay backup drive system that allows me to remove the drives when they are full and replace with new ones. The simpler the better as I am not familiar with what RAID is for, I just want to drag my files onto one drive and have it automatically copy the files to the second drive without me manually needing to make sure they are identical. I am not worried about speed nor need to do this remotely. Any suggestions?
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Backup Drive System Suggestions
- Thread starter ryanschude
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Ha ha ha. Oh, you were serious. I wouldn't trust Drobo with my data if they paid me to put my stuff on one. OP, get yourself a toaster, a copy of CarbonCopy Cloner, and a few cheap drives and call it a day. No better way to do backups IMHO.
Edited to reflect opinion, not fact. Feel better now mobilehaathi?
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You're a remarkably derisive fellow. Did I do something to you or is this your normal state?
RAID stand for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. There are many types of RAID, but RAID 0 and 1 are easy to understand.
RAID 0: Uses multiple hard drives and they act as one. Data is written across all of the hard drives. So you might have half a file one disk and the other half on the other, but the two halves get written the same time, thus decreasing the write and time and increases speed.
RAID 1: Mirrors two hard drives at the same time. So if one fails you still have a back up copy left of your data.
That's the basic idea there, if I'm incorrect of the technical details, please correct me.
But it sounds like a RAID 1 set up might be idea for you. You can get external hard drives that are set up to be used as RAID 1 or 0. For example, Western Digital makes some HDs with two HDs in the enclosure. So if it's a 2TB drive, you can use it as a 1TB RAID 1 or 2TB RAID 0. The drive would have two 1TB HDs inside, so RAID 1 using "half" of the storage and mirrors one HD to the other. Whereas RAID 0 would use both HDs as one 2TB drive.
Hope that makes sense.
Read this RAID Wiki for more info and visuals of how they work under comparison