Simple inexpensive usb raid bay

[Tomasg]

Hello. I make some commercial photography and I need simple reliable backup system for my works. I don't need much space (for now, I only have ~200GB of information), but it expands quickly. What I need is reliable storage system for archive and backup.

I do all the work on a fast laptop (with external lcd) with enough space for current works. But I need a USB drive bay or other device where I could make all archive. Everything it has to do is contain couple of hard drives mirrored (3.5" or 2.5"), ultra high speed is not needed, but I could put the files to it as one drive, and it could make copies in two (or more, but two I think is enough) hdds. No need for network access, portability, lcd's, no need for hot-swap or other functions. I just put files via usb several times a week, it mirrors it to both drives, and I can take information when it's needed.

There are some cheap usb raid bays on ebay, but I'm a bit uncertain of chinese no-name hardware. How much should I spend and what should You recommend?

 

[Grimham]

Well, you could simply get a 2 bay NAS with the drives mirrored - like something from here.

Them again, maybe using something as simple as SyncToy would work for you.

Always make a cd/dvd backup or the like for important stuff. RAID is for uptime and redundancy, not fault tolerance.

 

[drescherjm]

Remember that raid is not a backup. Even raid 1 mirroring. Get 2 independent drives and use windows integrated backup to backup your data to the second disk. Leave the second disk disconnected and unpowered when you are not making a backup. I actually recommend going further with this and buying yet another disk so that you can alternate backup drives each week.