External RAID 1 or Drive Clone

[elliots11]

I’ve got a lot of large video projects and I want them archived securely and easily.

So basically I wanted a RAID 1 as an external Hard drive, just keep it dead simple, or so I thought. I bought 2x 8TB Seagate drives off Amazon and a Hornettek enclosure from Fry’s. I noticed the enclosure sucked for a couple of reasons during setup and I returned it yesterday, but one thing I’m noticing is that the drives which were part of the RAID are no longer readable at all.

I figured if a RAID 1 had a drive fail I’d be able to hook up the surviving drive to a computer and read it as normal without the enclosure, but that isn’t the case here. What am I supposed to do if the enclosure fails and another enclosure isn’t available, or it doesn’t work?

I guess I could hook up 2 drives to the computer and automate backups but I’ve already got a lot of drives hooked up. I guess I could get a tape drive setup but that’s expensive and cumbersome. A synology is a maybe but it’s expensive and complex and I want simple and affordable.

I’m probably going to try another RAID 1 enclosure (probably a Mediasonic) since I don’t know what else to do, at least it’d buy me some time to respond in the case of a failure and I’d still have 1 drive, but if you have any ideas on a dead simple two drive clone setup without any gotchas I’m looking for something like that.

E

 

[seagate_surfer]

I’ve got a lot of large video projects and I want them archived securely and easily.

So basically I wanted a RAID 1 as an external Hard drive, just keep it dead simple, or so I thought. I bought 2x 8TB Seagate drives off Amazon and a Hornettek enclosure from Fry’s. I noticed the enclosure sucked for a couple of reasons during setup and I returned it yesterday, but one thing I’m noticing is that the drives which were part of the RAID are no longer readable at all.

I figured if a RAID 1 had a drive fail I’d be able to hook up the surviving drive to a computer and read it as normal without the enclosure, but that isn’t the case here. What am I supposed to do if the enclosure fails and another enclosure isn’t available, or it doesn’t work?

I guess I could hook up 2 drives to the computer and automate backups but I’ve already got a lot of drives hooked up. I guess I could get a tape drive setup but that’s expensive and cumbersome. A synology is a maybe but it’s expensive and complex and I want simple and affordable.

I’m probably going to try another RAID 1 enclosure (probably a Mediasonic) since I don’t know what else to do, at least it’d buy me some time to respond in the case of a failure and I’d still have 1 drive, but if you have any ideas on a dead simple two drive clone setup without any gotchas I’m looking for something like that.

E

Sorry to hear your setup is giving you trouble. It may be a good idea to make sure the drives are healthy. We have a free diagnostic software called SeaTools you can run tests with.

 

[matreya]

What kind of connections do you have on your Mac, other than USB3? If you have Thunderbolt, you could use something like this:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB2U3MED0GB/

 

[elliots11]

What kind of connections do you have on your Mac, other than USB3? If you have Thunderbolt, you could use something like this:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB2U3MED0GB/

I definitely want some sort of USB connection, right now I'm on a classic Mac Pro with a USB3 card, and that one has both USB and Thunderbolt, so I could conceivably use it. But it's a hardware RAID and that might mean that I'm locked into the enclosure.

Anyone ever heard of SoftRAID? I hear that's good from some people I know.

Seagate Surfer - none of my problems are Seagate related, but thank you

 

[matreya]

I definitely want some sort of USB connection, right now I'm on a classic Mac Pro with a USB3 card, and that one has both USB and Thunderbolt, so I could conceivably use it. But it's a hardware RAID and that might mean that I'm locked into the enclosure.

I've never heard of a Classic Mac Pro with actual Thunderbolt ports...

Anyone ever heard of SoftRAID? I hear that's good from some people I know.

I use it quite extensively, but I use them with Thunderbolt enclosures... very solid, although it tends to break when a major macOS update comes along... so I would put off updating beyond High Sierra when the time arises and waiting for updates from Softraid.com.

That said, with a USB interface, you are much better performance-wise to get a Hardware RAID such as this:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MED3ER0GB/

 

[macpro2000]

I would do a RAID 1 and an extra external SSD Clone with CarbonCopyCloner. Then you have all bases covered. Just get a good enclosure from OWC to put the drives in. I do this and can sleep at night. Easy.

 

[elliots11]

I've never heard of a Classic Mac Pro with actual Thunderbolt ports...

I meant the hard drive enclosure had Thunderbolt Ports, not the classic Mac Pro. Thanks for the ideas, as well.

 

[marzer]

I’m probably going to try another RAID 1 enclosure (probably a Mediasonic) since I don’t know what else to do, at least it’d buy me some time to respond in the case of a failure and I’d still have 1 drive, but if you have any ideas on a dead simple two drive clone setup without any gotchas I’m looking for something like that.

If you want to keep it simple, buy an enclosure to hold the drives that lets you address them as independent drives. Such as, https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MED3ER0GB/. I’m partial to OWC, used their stuff for years, very good products, great customer service too. Set it to independent drives.

Designate one as your working drive and the other for backups. Then use your preferred backup software: Time machine, Chronosync, Carbon clover, etc. to perform backups to the second drive. I recommend backups instead of cloning to ensure you capture incremental changes to work files. I wouldn’t mess with Raid until your needs for expanding storage capabilities changes I the future. But as you said, dead simple for now.