Best Raid 1 FW800 External Enclosure Solution

[knemonic]

Hello Everyone,

I have been racking my brain on what I should do. I currently have a OWC QX2 which I have not been satisfied with, had it bout 1 year 4 months now. Now that 2tb hard drives have come down, I am thinking of moving over to a Raid 1 instead of 5.

I am aware OWC, Western Digital and G-Technology (there are some other lesser names too I found) have solutions but I was curious what is the best one. I need it to have FW800, Raid 1 and possibly to find one that allows future upgrades, like to 3tb drives.

Western Digital has informed me you cannot upgrade their 2tb(raid 1)/4tb Studio II with bigger drives (that is with 3tb drives expected to come out later this year).

Any help is greatly appreciated!
Thank you,
Tim

 

[mulo]

to me the best solution for any raid setup is a drobo!
http://www.drobo.com/

I would recommend the simplest drobo, has FW800 and USB.
http://www.drobo.com/products/drobo.php

and you can expand it up to 4x2TB

I'm also thinking with a little bit of trickery you can even do a raid 1 with the drobo.

 

[Tom J]

I've been thinking about the OWC QX2. Can you elaborate on what the problems are?

 

[knemonic]

Regarding the drobo, when i was originally looking for the the qx2 I looked into the it. I feel I have come to the conclusion that the more complex a unit is, the more the chance that when something goes wrong, it goes horribly wrong. That is what I am seeing commens about the drobo. People have had to backup their data, lose it 1-5 times, just all sorts of headaches. I have had two issues with the qx2 the last being a pain, and I am waiting for it to come back.

I think I will end up going with the studio ii cause it is simple, and 2tb drive mirrored is enough for now. I have close to 1.5tb but I won't fill that up probably till the summer. By then, a 3tb mirrored version of the studio will be out.

The qx2 is an ok system. I had a glitch in the beginning where I lost my time machine partition and they said it was best to have a seperate backup in case. I thought this was annoying cause when I bout the qx2 it was $800. When you sound that much, you expect it to work (and that was the 3tb model).

This latest issue is what is really bothering me cause I have been without it for over a week now. I came home from vaca last week and turned my imac and qx. A few hours later it started to randomly unmount my partitions and the alarm would buzz and all the lights turned off. I did my tests and could not find anything so I called. They could not tell the problem over the phone so I sent em the cAse. They could not find an issue and asked me to send in the drives. His is where I got worried because I hadn't made a back up in a couple weeks and made some changes to the files. They said it could be the partitions management or one of e drives could have failed. What bothers me is if a drive failed one of the drive lights should turn on, which they didn't.

It's just a headache cause I want something is ease of mind and this has not provided it. For $380 I can get a studio ii and mirror them, which will be enough space for now. Sometimes I think raid is not all worth the hassle though, especially raid 5.

Like I aid above, I ink simplicity wins every day in computers.

Any other raid solutions out there besides the studio drobo and qx? I wish there was a good choice cause I would really like the option to upgrade the drives when they are full.

Later