looking to buy an external RAID hard dive

my photo collection is ALL over the place right now. i am hoping that with an external RAID drive, i can have all my photos stored and backed up in one place. anyone have any recomendations on brands, or models, or place to buy? anyone else backup using this method?

thanks in advance

Costco maxtor 1.5 TB about $500

A friend of mine just bought a Western Digital MyBook Pro II (500GBx2) RAID array. It's a pretty compact, portable unit and seems to work well.

Yes we are several that use external raid. You can find several thread on this subject.

I currently use this one: http://www.stardom.com​.tw/sohoraid%20sr3600.​htm I use it in mirror setup with 2 x 300 GB harddisks.

I am going to buy a bigger RAID5 setup eventually. Either a Buffalo or Thecus.

But remember a RAID setup is not a replacement of backup.

thanks y'all.

tommy that looks sweet. how/where can i buy one?

also, is RAID 1 not a backup?

No mirroring cannot be considered a backup. The file system can get corrupt in which case both drives suffer or the controller can toast both drives I have had the last happen once.

So I use that box as my main storage but take backup on an extra external harddisk as well as on DVD.

Where to buy that is a good question I am sure other from US can answer better than me.

tommykjensen wrote in post #3068816
No mirroring cannot be considered a backup. The file system can get corrupt in which case both drives suffer or the controller can toast both drives I have had the last happen once.

So I use that box as my main storage but take backup on an extra external harddisk as well as on DVD.

I cannot stress this enough, so many people get carried away by the mystique of the RAID system, that they are lulled into a false sense of security. We deal with images at worg, and use thre Huge raid systems on three different rack systems, yet every image is backed up nightly to tape, once a month for a master to tape, and once a month to a DVD, and the tapes and DVDs are storred off site.

All that is true of RAID for sure. Believe me I know. I had a 4 disk RAID system go completely berserk...forget rebuilding when the controller fries 2 drives. Most RAID setups only protect if ONE drive goes faulty...not when 2 or more decide it was their time to go.

Also, it's just personal preference and bad experiences talking...but I'd stay away from the 500+ GB drives...ESPECIALLY the 1TB+ drives. I've seen way too many drives die. If I had 1TB of information disappear all at once, I don't know what I'd do. I'd suggest getting multiple smaller drives. They're cheaper, and easier to replace/rebuild after a crash.

KonTiki wrote in post #3068829
I cannot stress this enough, so many people get carried away by the mystique of the RAID system, that they are lulled into a false sense of security. We deal with images at worg, and use thre Huge raid systems on three different rack systems, yet every image is backed up nightly to tape, once a month for a master to tape, and once a month to a DVD, and the tapes and DVDs are storred off site.

I couldn't agree with this more. For the purposes of the home photographer I think these setups (in general) do more harm than good. Unless you have massive amounts of data being written constantly (like a database), these is no need for RAID. For the purposes of backing up your pictures IMHO, this is an unnecessary expense and overly complicated. I also think automated backup software is a bad idea. The problem with it is that people become complacent because the auto backup is working nicely. Your drive dies, and then you discover your auto backup software stopped working 2 weeks ago and you never noticed, then what? And if you are checking it every time you upload your files, then what is the point of an automated system?

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of situations where these things make perfect sense, just not for most people here. You copy your flash card to a drive, when its done you take those files and back them up some place else. By doing it manually you KNOW the backup definitely took place, it takes 2 seconds, and you do not have a level of hardware abstraction between you and your data as is the case with a raid controller that can fail.

Well, I am going to go against the suggestions above. I have an Infrant Ready NAS NV with 4 250Gb drives in it giving about 650Gb in X-RAID. It emails me if anything happens in the system so a drive failure will be apparent pretty quickly. It is still the backup to my internal hard drives since they access much faster for normal processing tasks. However, I now have some redundancy in the NAS and, should I have a double failure in it the original data is still on the internal drives. I do still have DVD back-ups as well but who nows how long they last before corrupting.

If my places were to burn, I would still lose the lot of course so let's hope the sprinklers work properly if something that bad should ever happen!

hahah....not that sprinklers and hard drives pair particularly well...


But yeah, you at least have some redundancy, so that's good. You probabyl don't need a RAID config on the outside...you won't notice much (if any performance boost).

removed

just discovered this thread. I'm looking for a decent backup solution to work alongside a catalogue (I'm using iView). I see the downfalls of using RAID (particularly RAID1, which I was hoping to use). I guess manual backups to TWO seperate USB external drives is the way to go.

chet79 wrote in post #3386334
just discovered this thread. I'm looking for a decent backup solution to work alongside a catalogue (I'm using iView). I see the downfalls of using RAID (particularly RAID1, which I was hoping to use). I guess manual backups to TWO seperate USB external drives is the way to go.

Since this come up again I can give you all an update that underlines the importance to keep multiple backups.

My external harddisk as I described above started to show failures. Files were getting corrupt. The disk itself did not fail but the data were getting corrupt. In some cases I were able to copy the data but I were unable to open or even delete the files. And since it was a mirror setup both disks were identical with the same corrupted files.

Fortunately I keep several backups. So I could restore everything without any loss.

I have now replaced that box with a new temporary solutions. A Buffalo LinkStation Live. I got it thursday and it works great. It is a network storage which means I can access the data from both my main pc and my laptop. On my main pc I also have a copy of the newest of my photos for faster processing.

Later I am going to add a Thecus N5200 and put 5 x 500 GB disks in that box and run it in RAID 6 which means 2 disks can fail and it is still possible to recover data. But still it won't protect against corrupted files.

I gotta say the Buffalo LinkStation works like a dream. Right now I am running a backup to a secondary usb disk . This disk is connected directly to the LinkStation and my pc is not affected by the backup. If I had the disks connected directly to my pc with USB or firewire my pc would be tied up for many hours. Now I can even shutdown my pc and the backup will continue to run.