Recommendations for affordable RAID 1 for home? ...

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speedmaster

speedmaster

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Aug 6, 2008
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I have a 256GB SSD in my Mac Mini. I would like to get a RAID 1 going externally to store my iTunes and iPhoto data. It would be duped on two disks, and also free up the internal SSD. Then I could occasionally make an additional copy of the data to another disk and store offsite as well I guess.

Anyway, I'm trying to find a RAID 1 system for not much more than $200. What would you recommend? Right now I'm using Carbonite and my total backup is only about 38GB. It's growing, but I think a total storage capacity of 1TB would keep me in business for a while.

Any recommendations? Doesn't have to be USB 3 or Firewire, but I guess that would be nice.

Thanks very much in advance,
Chris
 
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Solandri
Are you sure RAID 1 is what you want? RAID is not a backup. RAID is for redundancy. So a drive can fail and you will suffer no downtime - the data is still available and the file server still usable while you go about getting a replacement drive. It's mostly for businesses who would lose money for every hour their file server is down.

RAID doesn't work as a backup because if you accidentally delete a file, it gets deleted from all the RAID drives simultaneously. If you're storing important information on a RAID array, you still need to back it up.

If you just want a bigger file server, buy an external drive and plug it in.

If you want a backup, buy an external drive and plug it in only while you're making backups. I'd still...
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Solandri

Solandri

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Jan 4, 2012
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Are you sure RAID 1 is what you want? RAID is not a backup. RAID is for redundancy. So a drive can fail and you will suffer no downtime - the data is still available and the file server still usable while you go about getting a replacement drive. It's mostly for businesses who would lose money for every hour their file server is down.

RAID doesn't work as a backup because if you accidentally delete a file, it gets deleted from all the RAID drives simultaneously. If you're storing important information on a RAID array, you still need to back it up.

If you just want a bigger file server, buy an external drive and plug it in.

If you want a backup, buy an external drive and plug it in only while you're making backups. I'd still keep an off-site backup like Carbonite around though. That way if your house and computer burn down, your data is still safe.

If you want the no-downtime guarantee that comes with redundancy, then you can put together a RAID 1 array. Sans Digital and Medialogic are a couple of the better known makers of external RAID enclosures. Though for your storage requirements, you may want to look into getting a cheap 2-bay NAS instead. SmallNetBuilder has a good overview of those:
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas
 
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