carnage

2-Drive RAID enclosures.

I bought a 500 GB LaCie Big Disk a couple of months ago, but I didn't do enough research: it's two 3.5" 250 GB IDE drives, inside a nice aluminum case with a circuit board that makes the appear as a single volume on my desktop. The problem? I haven't really solved my redundant data issue. I'll be able to store a bunch of information to it, but it'll still be just one copy of the data. Worse yet, since the drives are written to randomly, I now have two sets of drive hardware that can fail. I've basically made my system no less fault-tolerant, and twice as fault-prone. Back to the drawing board.

I'm now in the hunt for a cheap, true RAID case. At this point, I'm still open to software (OS-level) versus hardware (in-case circuit board) RAID control, and I've found a couple of options.

Link: MINI 3.5'' SATA Dual Drive Aluminum Enclosure with SATA Output.

Link: DUAL DRIVE FIREWIRE 800/400 OXFORD 912 ALUMINUM MINI RAID ENCLOSURE .

A good site about RAID.

AC&NC has published a nice light reference site for all the various types of RAID configurations out there. RAID, which stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, involves hooking together a bunch of smaller (and usually cheaper) drives, rather than relying on one massive (expensive) drive. Depending on your configuration, you can get substantial speed gains, fault-tolerant storage, or both.

The tutorial walks you through the basic characteristics of each configuration scheme, with an illustration of how the drives and data are related. Beneath each picture is a brief explanation of the set-up, and a list of advantages of disadvantages.

Right now I'm evaluating between RAID 1 and RAID 5 for my future, "once and for all" data bank project. More on that later.

AN&NC's "RAID.edu" tutorial site

G-SAFE.

I just got turned on to G-Technologies, who appear to make "professional strength," highly-engineered storage products. They appear to be setting their sites squarely on LaCie. All of their stuff looks like it's made of aluminum, and they have some innovative features, like cooling fins on their fanless drive cases.

They've just announced the G-SAFE, which is a 2-drive RAID 1 array, which means you get the much safer mirroring, rather than the higher speed and capacity (but zero redundancy) of RAID 0. (I'm just now really learning about RAID these days, and will have a more complete rundown of the various options soon.)

They don't have a page on their site yet; just a PDF. The G-SAFE is supposed to be on sale now, but I can't find it anywhere. It starts at $499.

G-Technologies G-SAFE brochure PDF

Thanks, Goldie!