How many people are actually doing a true RAID vs dumping files on a external HD? RAID has mirroring, stripping, fault protection discs, all sorts of levels. I am not looking to peel data off the drives in record time, rather I am merely looking at a good way for storage with drive failure protection.
I already archive my RAWS on gold CDs, but with only 50 images per CD, I'm considering moving to DVDs for this part.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
While I am now waiting on their (hopefully soon) upcoming PCI-E card, I used 2x two bay enclosures with RAID 1 and the PCI-X card on my old setup. Gave me great piece of mind and was easy as to set up.
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How many people are actually doing a true RAID vs dumping files on a external HD? RAID has mirroring, stripping, fault protection discs, all sorts of levels. I am not looking to peel data off the drives in record time, rather I am merely looking at a good way for storage with drive failure protection.
I already archive my RAWS on gold CDs, but with only 50 images per CD, I'm considering moving to DVDs for this part.
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RAID 3/5, which uses a parity drive, is expensive enough that I think it makes more sense to just buy two regular units and backup frequently and/or mirror one to the other. Drive failures are not that common with good quality drives.
I guess what I am doing now would be considered RAID 1 or mirroring. I merely have a second drive that I make a copy of my regular storage drive onto. Both are external FW HDs, the OWC Mercury FW400/800/USB2 drives. (I believe they have Hitachi drives inside.) With Apple seemingly dropping FW800 support, the FW800 on those is not that big a deal anymore.
I'm not a huge volume shooter nor am I a design house, and the price of those RAID units with drives installed is pretty high. I recall seeing a photo of Mark Tuckers set-up, it seems he just bought a dozen or so drives in cases and daisy-chained them all together. I don't know if he is running them with mirrored configuration or what.
Most drives in cases have a 1 year warranty, but if you buy your own individual drive, you get a 5 year warranty, and most of the cases seem pretty much the same. Is that something to consider?
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
It seems most people I know are merely doing a two HD type of storage, save it to the primary external HD, then copy that drive to the other external on a regualr basis. If I use Disk Utility to actually configure my two exyernals as a RAID 1, do they need to both be the same size HD? Does this automatically then send the same data out to both drives as I save a file?
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
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It seems most people I know are merely doing a two HD type of storage, save it to the primary external HD, then copy that drive to the other external on a regualr basis. If I use Disk Utility to actually configure my two exyernals as a RAID 1, do they need to both be the same size HD? Does this automatically then send the same data out to both drives as I save a file?
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Yes. If they are different sizes then you can only use up the smaller one's capacity. And yes again - from the Desktop or Finder they look/act as just the one drive.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
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