External Drive Options

[rhinehart.17]

My external drive I have recently crashed and I lost about 200 movies and a lot of tv shows. I am now looking for a new drive to buy. I have been looking around but haven't found anything with a reasonable price and good reviews that matches what I am looking for. Maybe someone here could give me some info/ideas.

The main thing I want is at least 1 TB of storage space. I would also prefer to have the data backed up to prevent a complete loss again. Would the best way to do this be to use RAID 1?
This will mainly be used to connect to my laptop (MBP), mainly for movies and backups, so a usb or firewire 800 is needed.

I have been looking at the MyBook external drive that support mirroring but the prices seem a little outrageous. Can anyone recommend something else that fits my specs, or possible another solution other than an external drive?

Thanks for the help

 

[Dangman]

The main thing I want is at least 1 TB of storage space. I would also prefer to have the data backed up to prevent a complete loss again. Would the best way to do this be to use RAID 1?

Not really. RAID 1 is not backup. In fact no RAID level is backup. RAID does not prevent or protect against deletion, corruption, or infection of the files. All RAID 1 protects against is hardware failure. Therefore RAID is not backup. A good backup would another or addtional external hard drive (assuming that you already one on hand), DVD or even Blu-Ray discs.

Now what's your max budget for an external hard drive/backup option?

 

[rhinehart.17]

I guess in this case I mean backup in the sense that for RAID 1 the data is stored on 2 separate drives. This allows one of the drives to fail without any loss of data, then the failed drive can be replaced. Correct? I am not very familiar with RAID so let me know if I have this wrong or if there is a better option...

In terms of the budget, I was hoping to stay under $300. I am not sure how feasible this is. 1 TB drives go for about $100+, and I would need 2 of them to have the data fully protected from drive failure. However I would then need some type of external casing. I have also been thinking about possible just buying the drives and throwing them into an old system and converting it into a server of sorts. This could potentially be cheaper but might not be as fast if the system is somewhat old/slow. Any thoughts?

 

[Dangman]

I guess in this case I mean backup in the sense that for RAID 1 the data is stored on 2 separate drives. This allows one of the drives to fail without any loss of data, then the failed drive can be replaced. Correct? I am not very familiar with RAID so let me know if I have this wrong or if there is a better option...

In terms of the budget, I was hoping to stay under $300. I am not sure how feasible this is. 1 TB drives go for about $100+, and I would need 2 of them to have the data fully protected from drive failure. However I would then need some type of external casing. I have also been thinking about possible just buying the drives and throwing them into an old system and converting it into a server of sorts. This could potentially be cheaper but might not be as fast if the system is somewhat old/slow. Any thoughts?

Well there's still a chance of loss of data with RAID1 should, for some very bad luck and odd reasons, the RAID array gets corrupted when one of the drives die. But assuming that no data loss occurs, yes, if one of the drives fail, you can replace the failed drive.

As for the file server idea, for file serving duties, you don't really need that much power. I'm personally using a Pentium III CPU as my file server at the moment. Fast enough for myself and the three other users.

Personally, if it was me, I'd just get a 1 TB drive, throw it into that old PC and turn it into a file server. However, I would also buy an external 1TB drive to serve as backup for the file server and your data. Should the external drive die or the file server die, you'll have at least one untouched verion/backup/copy of your data somewhere.