external hard drive recommendation 1

[winetech]

I am looking for a good raid 1 external hard drive. Can anyone recommend a good one. I have been looking at the buffolo brand duo USB/firewall, but I have read some reviews and got mixed ratings about them. My requirements are dual hard drives with raid 1. Good tech support. Hard drive needs to accessible by users. I was also wanting NAS storage, but I was told the permission attributes of the backed up files can differ from the original files.

 

[vbcoder85]

IOMEGA eSata drives. You can get an eSata card (with 4 outputs) and you can connect up to 4 eSata drives in your Raid Array.

We are only using one eSata drive and it's fast. USB and Firewire are extremly slow compared to eSata. Our IOMEGA drive has eSata/USB which is nice if we ever want to just plug it into another computer for backing data up. So we have the best of both worlds.

 

[wahnula]

Norco makes a nice kit:

http://www.norcotek.com/item_detail.php?categoryid=8&modelno=ds-500

...it comes with an eSATA PCI/PCI-X card. Did I say it was nice?
It's scalable up to (5) drives.

Tony

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[winetech]

Thanks Tony

What about if we need to take the drives off site or do you have the kit in a different room then your servers. Just curious in case there is a fire in the server room.

 

[wahnula]

What about if we need to take the drives off site

If you had, say, a RAID 1 array you could get more rack rails & drives and take away the second member of the RAID 1 array away (in a static-proof bag and well padded) by simply sliding the drive out of the rack and replacing it with another.

If you wanted to archive, you would remove the rails from the old drive, attach to the new, and let the array rebuild itself.

The multiple extra bays in the Norco would not be a bad thing; you could run a simple 2-drive RAID 1 array and rotate one of the bottom two drives for off-site use. Or, you could build a RAID 1+0 array which will give you better I/O.

You did not mention portability in your original post; I assumed (bad word) that this was just external storage and backup would be handled by the server's central backup software. If it was my rig, and I did not have the capability to add it to my central backup, I would have a couple separate 2.5" laptop drives in an external cases a bit larger than the drives in the RAID 1 array (if possible, if not then 3.5" drives) connected by USB, eSATA, or Firewire and use a simple file-copy sort of backup on the array.

RAID 1 is never a substitute for regular backups. It is protection against a single drive failing, that's it. Best of luck, thanks for the star. Made my day!

Tony

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