Anyone using this RAID

[Raymate]

Just ordered this RAID from Western Digital.

It's the 1TB RAID drive.

http://www.wdmybook.com/en/

Going to use it as a 500GB Mirror RAID.

If your in the UK then Amazon have just dropped it down to £299 so I placed an order just now for it.

Just wondered if anyone else uses it and their views on it?

Cheers

Ray :)

[StealthLude]

I custom make all my RAID setups with Hardware 3ware raid cards... This gets expencive considering a good raid card is like $300-500 US. + Drives.

I always recomend RAID 5...

If you want an external setup, that should work just fine. Its a stright Mirror, so you dont really need a raid card.

Just the fact you have a raid setup is pretty smart. Most people dont, and they day the hard drive dies, its going to be a sad one when pictures are lost.

Anything RAID is better than none.

[tommykjensen]

Anything RAID is better than none.

Yes but it is important to add that RAID mirror is NOT backup. Both drives can fail at the same time or the controller can fail and destroy both drives at the same time. I have had that happen to me.

[Raymate]

Cheers for that, I thought it looked like a good idea, now I have two RAIDs in my G4.

One is stripe for my boot drive then the other is mirror for storage, but the mirror is getting full so an external look like the answer so I can move it around my Macs.

Yes with drives it's a case of when not if, last week I was using a 400GB drive and the platters shattered and destroyed the drive (I'm an Apple Engineer in my day job) of course the data was lost.

I have my stuff in at least two places just in case.

But RAID is the way to go.

R

[StealthLude]

Yes but it is important to add that RAID mirror is NOT backup. Both drives can fail at the same time or the controller can fail and destroy both drives at the same time. I have had that happen to me.


Thats why I make backups of my backups =)

I have a server for just my data backups of all our work and family computers... My personal computer and both the server have raid backups...

[Jon]

Yes but it is important to add that RAID mirror is NOT backup. Both drives can fail at the same time or the controller can fail and destroy both drives at the same time. I have had that happen to me.And RAID doesn't protect you from accidental file deletions, either.

[Kostyanych]

I am using RAID 0. :) Seriously. But it's a different story. :)
I know it's even less reliable....
That's why I have another hard drive as a photo backup only (every night system copies new files into my backup drive, moves (!!!) deleted or modified files (which were deleted from original folder or modified ) to a special folder on the backup drive (so every time I have original version as well).
Also I have another hard drive in my drawer at work which I bring a couple of times a month (I know should be a bit more frequent...) to do external backup.
Also I burn DVDs sometimes. I hope I will be able to save some photos in case of something...
I had a couple of hdd failure in past 3 years. I lost a couple of files from one failure. But it was something not important.
But!!! I lost about 30 photos because of my mistake. I just deleted a folder. And a bit later I noticed that. But it was too late to recover files.
So my opinion is if you have 2 hard drives: 1 working HDD + 1 regular backup (there are some utilities which can do instant backup because they monitor your primary HDD) to another HDD gives you better protection than 2 HDD in a mirror RAID.

[strmrdr]

Tape backup with off site storage is the only way to go.
If you have important client files you owe it to yourself and them to use it.
Its not cheap...

[CyberDyneSystems]

Looks like a very nice deal,. pretty much just the cost of two internal 500GB drives no? Very affordable and portable solution (if need be)