Electronics Wish List
 

My birthday is fast approaching and I have been tempted with all of the electronics ads I see.

So far my only purchase has been an $18 remote controlled helicopter from an outlet store that I have been flying indoors (the loose foldaway rotor blades really come in handy).

But every once in a while, a high ticket item comes in that tests my resolve and makes me ask the question 'do I need this?'.

Storage-wise, I am not near that limit on my primary external drive (370GB), but I am near the limit on the secondary drive I use to backup the first (189GB).

From a backup/safety perspective, is RAID 1 really worth anything?

I still have my Simpletech 8GB USB plugin drive, so I have some experience with the company.

But I always feel that with electronics you only buy it when you need it because it only gets cheaper.

I am sooooo tempted by this.

Had you thought about an NAS instead?

The purpose is to have the storage available to my primary computer, with redundancy so I don't lose pictures, e-mails, etc to a hardware crash.

I don't need to make the storage available to the network and I would be afraid to do so since my cable modem hooks me to a large network. Also, I thought NAS required a dedicated computer. Even if it didn't, my cheap desktop couldn't handle the load of being an NAS and being a home computer.

The 1TB drive comes with a RAID switch on the back. It seems to me it would be a turnkey solution to something I've been doing manually.

Plus, just saying I have a 1TB drive at home (actually two 500gb drives in a single enclosure) would be cool.:D

On a related question, My Dell laptop HD is full, 80 gigs. I went through and dumped a bunch of stuff I never used but really did not free up that much space. I bought a external 100 gig HD to back up the My Documents folder in case it crashed. Now since the cruise, a few fun things and an upcoming motorcycle ralley I can't load anymore digital pics because it is full again. Can I transfer all my files in My Documents file to the external HD and still have complete and easy (uncorrupted) access? How else can I make this work? Any ideas for how to properly use the external HD? or links on how to better use this device to keep my laptop going for another 100 gigs?

:lol2:

Is RAID 1 worth anything? Sure. Like most of these things, it's a sliding scale. (You can get security level X by spending dollar amount Y, etc.)

But make sure: A) you understand how the system lets you know one of your drives has failed and B) you pay attention to it. It won't do much good if the disk craps out and you never notice it. (Voice of experience.)

You can use backup software to either back up (drive A always to drive B) or synchronize (newest file A to B or B to A) your drives.

Right now, giveaway of the day is giving away a free backup program called Insofta Document Backup. Read the user comments and decide if this fulfills your needs. Backup programs that zip files are great for space, but you have to be sure the zipped files can be unzipped using a standard zip program.

Well, that takes care of the temptation.

Now I only have to worry about the next sub-$200 1TB drive.

I'm not sure there is a benefit to doing hardware RAID using some P.O.S. box's hardware anyway. They say losing a drive is bad but it's not worse than losing your entire external box with a proprietary RAID technology that's not exactly kosher with other external boxes.

So getting two internal 500 GB drives and running a software RAID 1 is not a bad choice. Or running a late-night scheduled mirror copy between two drives using Microsoft's Robocopy GUI.

That's not much different from my using the backup software I use now.

I would still like an external box solution.

Rich, then you get an external HD
 

Rich,

Undertoad is 100% right. You don't want to get a proprietary all in one solution that handles your RAID.

Get yourself a decent external SATA HD and case, and with the money you save, get a good backup program like Symantec Backup Exec desktop edition. If you want more backups, get more drives. Symantec will handle that for you, and their solution works.

If you don't want to spend the money, get yourself Robocopy GUI (which is so much more powerful than standard file copy that to say it is like file copying is an insult. I know, I use it at a customer site), or get DeltaCopy for Windows (which is a nice installer for Rsync and Cygwin).

If you still want a decent solution, get yourself a PC with a dedicated RAID 5 card (or onboard RAID 5, or Linux with LVM) and run your stuff off of that. You can get free iSCSI Initiator and Target software (Microsoft supplies the Initiator SW for Windows, and you can get Linux target SW at: http://iscsitarget.sourceforge.net/), especially if you run Linux, and Gig-E ethernet cards are cheap.

This is something you want to think about :).

Thanks,

Mitch