I have an Apple Xserve Raid (14 x250GB drives - configured as two Raid 5 + hotspare volumes) that has served as my primary storage device for years, and on which I have stored all of my professional digital photography work from the past several years (I am currently working on a MacPro with 2 X 3GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon Processors and 8GB of DDR2 RAM)...My Xserve RAID is getting pretty old at this point, and I have repeatedly faced failed drives over the past several months, and I think its on the 'outs' to be honest...I was hoping that people would offer some suggestions for a replacement external storage device that I should consider...
A couple of things I really loved about the Xserve:
The fact that if a drive failed, it would simply resort to using a hot-spare and would rebuild the data onto that drive without skipping a beat...this kind of fail safe mechanism has proven itself to be essential time and time again (too many times really, which is why I am seeking a replacement HD)...
I also really liked how fast this drive was...at the time I purchase it about 5 years ago, it was pretty much at the top of the list in terms of speed, with a fiber cable connection that would read/write data at speeds that nearly match copying from one internal HD to another...
These are the primary things I am looking for in a replacement system...data transfer speeds, as well as stability.
Not having had the need to search for external HDs in a while, I am more or less out of the loop in terms of what's the best out there...I checked out the charts for external HD's on tomshardware, and also read the article, RAID Boxes Run Riot - http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/03/23/raid_boxes_run_riot/, but to be perfectly honest with you, I am no where near technically knowledgeable enough to make any sense out of either of these sources of information...I also read up a bit on The Drobo 'Data Saving Robot', which seems like it would be the ideal solution, if it were slowed down by the fact that it uses USB instead of SATA...
Basically, I was hoping that someone could please recommend for me an ultra fast, ultra reliable external hard drive that I could use to store my work from previous years, as well as the years to come...Speed is key! Stability is key! - if this means recommending two different options for me, one in regards to an ultra fast HD, and another in terms of an ultra reliable HD, that's fine to...
Any suggestions would be sincerely appreciated! Thanks so much...
A couple of things I really loved about the Xserve:
The fact that if a drive failed, it would simply resort to using a hot-spare and would rebuild the data onto that drive without skipping a beat...this kind of fail safe mechanism has proven itself to be essential time and time again (too many times really, which is why I am seeking a replacement HD)...
I also really liked how fast this drive was...at the time I purchase it about 5 years ago, it was pretty much at the top of the list in terms of speed, with a fiber cable connection that would read/write data at speeds that nearly match copying from one internal HD to another...
These are the primary things I am looking for in a replacement system...data transfer speeds, as well as stability.
Not having had the need to search for external HDs in a while, I am more or less out of the loop in terms of what's the best out there...I checked out the charts for external HD's on tomshardware, and also read the article, RAID Boxes Run Riot - http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/03/23/raid_boxes_run_riot/, but to be perfectly honest with you, I am no where near technically knowledgeable enough to make any sense out of either of these sources of information...I also read up a bit on The Drobo 'Data Saving Robot', which seems like it would be the ideal solution, if it were slowed down by the fact that it uses USB instead of SATA...
Basically, I was hoping that someone could please recommend for me an ultra fast, ultra reliable external hard drive that I could use to store my work from previous years, as well as the years to come...Speed is key! Stability is key! - if this means recommending two different options for me, one in regards to an ultra fast HD, and another in terms of an ultra reliable HD, that's fine to...
Any suggestions would be sincerely appreciated! Thanks so much...