External hard drives... w/ mirroring capability

[Scot]

Anyone have any experience with these.

JR.com: Western Digital My Book World Edition II Storage System - Remote Access & Sharin in Hard Drives:

I need to do something about the wife's memory sucking picture habit and we want to dump all our CDs to one location as MP3s. With this kind of storage I could save every movie I ever rent also.

 

[bushpilot]

no experiance w/ THIS particular unit...BUT...as far as RAID Arrays go
you can set that up w/ any disks you buy.

you can buy 500gb seagate 7200rpm 16MB-buffered drives for 90 bucks
these days....if you did that you only need 4 drives (plus a controller,
power supply & case).

I dont understand how much real storage there is in this unit...it says
UP TO 2 TeraByte (i guess thats w/ the Mirroring of the drives turned
off).

does it also have mirrored drive controllers too ? (i bet not)

 

[Scot]

The actual storage would be 1TB when mirrored. I want the mirroring capability so if 1 drive crashes there's a back-up. Another feature of this is free remote access from anywhere. It acts as a server with your high speed internet connection.

My Book World Edition II 2 TB Hard Drives ( WDG2NC20000 )

 

[bushpilot]

most of the network drives can do that stuff...
its nice packaging no doubt...im just saying there are plenty
of alternatives...and if youre interested you can build it on
your own for less.

 

[mwalls54]

both of my external hd's are WD and i havn't had a problem yet

 

[Big K]

The actual storage would be 1TB when mirrored. I want the mirroring capability so if 1 drive crashes there's a back-up. Another feature of this is free remote access from anywhere. It acts as a server with your high speed internet connection.

My Book World Edition II 2 TB Hard Drives ( WDG2NC20000 )

That is very expensive, you can do the same thing for TONS less

If you dont' need networking and all that, just get 2 external hard drives.

Then setup a XCOPY from one to another every day at a certain time.

I can help on this if you need to know more on the subject

 

[bushpilot]

XP has some built in funtionality <diskpart> that at least allows you to
SET UP mirror'ed drives.

when you get into RAID/ARRAY you have to consider the single point(s)
of failure...ill do you NO good to have a mirrored drive if youre running a
SINGLE controller (if the controller fails your dead...your data may be
preserved but you wont get to it)

same thing goes for the network card & network connections....if anyone
of those goes down your data may remain in tact but you wont be
able to access it.

 

[Big K]

Yea, I wouldn't do RAID unless it is in a server configuration.

Anything personal, USB connection or eSATA connection would be good.

It isn't as FAST but this is just backup, doesn't really need to be that fast.

Normally on Externals I have seen the controller will go out on the case but the hard drive still be good.

I have used vantec cases over the years and they have allways worked GREAT!

 

[Big K]

This is a pretty good deal

Buy.com - Cavalry Pre-formatted 1TB (2x500GB) USB 2.0 External Hard Drive - CADB001U32

 

[bushpilot]

Not bad...but when you consider you can buy a 500GB p-ata drive for
less than 90 bucks its still fairly expensive.