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Tragic accident....</3

killerwhack said:
Ok- so you got the media smart. What happens when your place catches fire? What if a burglar breaks in while you are on vacation? What if there is a pipe break and the room where your mediasmart is located is flooded/sprayed with water ?


You need to get another mediasmart and locate it elsewhere and then somehow configure them to mirror each other constantly.

Then, and only then, I will be satisfied.
Click to expand...

Huh? I'm curious...
Are you worried more about the physical mechanisms getting wet, damaged and fried? Or your data, getting washed away?

ericksgotmac said:
My 1TB WD drive failed and that's where I Kept EVERYTHING.
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Chances are ericksgotmac, the contents of the HD will be fine!
Even after a plane crash with a fire in the middle of the sea!
Even if the drive head's crash and the drive dies of a heinous death! The data will survive!!

Though, you'll definitely need to fork out for a decent data recovery service to recover the contents (assuming it's worth it).
 
The data was replaceable, it was basically just Blu-ray movies I ripped, programs I downloaded, and disc images I created so I could have a digital copy just incase the physical disc was scratched, I learned my lesson when my first Macbook's restoration discs where scratched beyond recognition.

So Drobo is a no go, it only has 4 bays with no further expansion. The HP Mediasmart Server has 4 bays as well as 4 USB ports and 1 eSata port. That's what's pulling me towards that item 4 bays PLUS further expansion via USB and eSata.

Any one else with some recommendations? Anything under $550 would be appreciated ;]
 
ericksgotmac said:
The data was replaceable, it was basically just Blu-ray movies I ripped, programs I downloaded, and disc images I created so I could have a digital copy just incase the physical disc was scratched, I learned my lesson when my first Macbook's restoration discs where scratched beyond recognition.

So Drobo is a no go, it only has 4 bays with no further expansion. The HP Mediasmart Server has 4 bays as well as 4 USB ports and 1 eSata port. That's what's pulling me towards that item 4 bays PLUS further expansion via USB and eSata.

Any one else with some recommendations? Anything under $550 would be appreciated ;]
Click to expand...

See... Your lucky!
As for me, I can't afford to lose my data, since most of it is work!

Hmm... Drobo is supposed to be a backuper's dream, since it'll dynamically expand the archive whenever the user slots in a new drive (removing the full one) but it does has it's down side as it's not meant to be high-performance, while other users have reported quirks.

I'm not sure how much redundancy you'll want or the budget you're thinking of working with. What I do know is this. There are several manufactures out there who can supply you with a solution and enclosure for four or more, right up to eight drives and some even larger but there's a heavy downside... Cost.

My solution would be to build an multi-disk array using four high-capacity drives.. say Seagate's 1.5TB mechanisms on a RAID5? With RAID5 you'll get the redundancy of one drive but it's quicker than RAID6 and by using 1.5TB devices you'll end up with a continuous capacity of 4.5TB (give or take a few GB). Then it's a matter of looking for a external standalone hardware based RAID5 solution with ExpressCard interface card, that's compatible on the MacBookPro's.

A suitable solution could be investing into a FASTA-1ex eSATA interface card. Then choose one of their external housings, such as a HDPro - But this ain't a cheap solution by any means, it's aimed at professionals. Now, if it we're me, I'd buy the smallest capacity unit and repopulate the drives with my own.

...I'm sure NanoFrog will be able to advise you.. though I'm not sure of his knowledge when it comes to laptops and notebooks.
 
Placing the very expensive 2TB tower aside :D I was looking at that eSata Expresscard. Would you recommend this one? I was looking into buying a good eSata Expresscard for my Macbook Pro but wasn't sure if any of the other ones were worth it (All of the ones at newegg.com) Is there any performance increase over FW800?
 
Im surprised that nobody talked about how a raid setup wouldnt cure the one drive failing thing. If its a raid setup between 2 1tb drives then it still means if one failed you lose everything.
 
mikes70mustang said:
Im surprised that nobody talked about how a raid setup wouldnt cure the one drive failing thing. If its a raid setup between 2 1tb drives then it still means if one failed you lose everything.
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Hiya mikes70mustang,
The OP stated he/she wishes to have 4TB storage. So explaining the the problems regarding two drive Striping isn't valid here as the biggest drives available right now is 1.5TB, giving a formatted capacity of just over 3TB.

As far as RAID5/RAID6 goes. You can have one failing HD on a RIAD5 and your data would still be safe. And upto 2 failed drives on RAID6. Ideally the user would need to replace the failed drive ASAP or risk losing all the data in the entire array!!
 
ericksgotmac said:
Placing the very expensive 2TB tower aside :D I was looking at that eSata Expresscard. Would you recommend this one? I was looking into buying a good eSata Expresscard for my Macbook Pro but wasn't sure if any of the other ones were worth it (All of the ones at newegg.com) Is there any performance increase over FW800?
Click to expand...

Without any actual experience on external RAID rigs, I can't offer an recommendation as to what you should buy.

And as far as eSATA vs FW800 goes. Well, I'd imagine a decent eSATA would be hell of alot faster! Giving that it's an actual external-SATA port connected directly to the PCIe bus via the ExpressCard interface, it should be capable of offering 3 GB/s! :D

As for using alternatives interface cards for RAID compatibility, I wouldn't know. I can only assume the CalDigit version is made in a way it's drivers that control the external rig is completely compatible with one another.
 
O ic, so anyway, anyone here ever heard of ADrive.com? Sounds like a pretty solid place to keep info. well at least up to 1TB of important stuff. O yah, and up to 50 GB free
 
mikes70mustang said:
O ic, so anyway, anyone here ever heard of ADrive.com? Sounds like a pretty solid place to keep info. well at least up to 1TB of important stuff. O yah, and up to 50 GB free
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Hmm... Personally, I wouldnt trust a free web service to secure my data , cause you'll never know what they might do with it (some of it's private).
 
Sounds to me pretty much the safest thing is get a SSD to put info on. No moving parts is best. That or go overkill and save all the same stuff in multiple places. Or just dont be complacent.
 
Like someone else already said, network drives would be the optimal solution. It can be as off site as you like but preferably in a closet or basement. If connected with gigE it should be a pretty decent solution. Some of the cheaper dell power edge servers will communicate with the OS and the hardware and warn you of a failure of your drives as soon as that information becomes evident from the S.M.A.R.T status.
 
I dunno about the rest of you's but speaking from my personal experiences.
I use my RAID array as a temp storage and huge high speed scratch disk, for a few projects i'm working on.

Then make weekly backups onto 25Gb/50Gb BD-RE Blu-Ray Discs, usually chewing up ten or more disks at a time, for each project. And just to be safe, I'll crate a further copy as a security backup and store them in a two ton safe! At the end of the day, it's all very time consuming and annoying. But it's way cheaper and far less stressful than losing a client.
 
killerwhack said:
Ok- so you got the media smart. What happens when your place catches fire? What if a burglar breaks in while you are on vacation? What if there is a pipe break and the room where your mediasmart is located is flooded/sprayed with water ?


You need to get another mediasmart and locate it elsewhere and then somehow configure them to mirror each other constantly.

Then, and only then, I will be satisfied.
Click to expand...

What happens when you die and no one cares.
 
FYI RAID is not a backup system. RAID is for redundancy and high availability.
 
rhyx said:
FYI RAID is not a backup system. RAID is for redundancy and high availability.
Click to expand...

"RAID Mirrored" is a sort of backup - you have (usually) two hard drives, and each hard drive has the same data on it. So if one hard drive fails, you are backed up with the other.
 
I got this eSATA expresscard:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16839228002

It has 2 ports, and it doesn't need drivers in Leopard. It will be faster than Firewire 800 if you have stuff that can transfer data at more than 800mbps or 100mb/s. I've seen peaks of almost 130mb/s on my 1TB external drive, so it is definitely faster than Firewire 800 for me. The card should be able to go up to 250mb/s overall (both ports combined) since expresscard is limited to 2gbps.
 
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