Hi Joe, Having a single drive external, while better than nothing is way not as good as having a 2 bay / drive raid 1 enclosure. in terms of safety i am talking. A step up in terms of safety would be a 4 drive raid 1 or 5 enclosure. A step up in all these cases, is having the drives/enclosures as a NAS device sitting in a different place (safer?) than the backed up computers are, and connected with the network to them.
Most 2-4 drive enclosures (that come with drives) state the capacity as a raid 0, which can be tricky for the uninitialized. A raid0 configuration will not increase safety, in fact it will reduce it drastically, so when looking at populated 2 - 4 drive units, as a rule of thumb, half the capacity for 2 disk units (to get the capacity in raid 1 terms). the 4 disk raids a bit more complicated. you can treat them as 2 pairs, this halving the capacity, or as a 4 disk raid 5, in which case you get 75% of the total disk capacities. For direct connect enclosures, look for e-sata capability, look for usb3 , specially if your backed up computer has these ports, you can not go wrong with these features. For NAS devices, look for the once that have dual gigabit Ethernet connectors, they usually perform better speed wise. If you are going to invest on a 2-4 or more drive external nas unit, think about augmenting it with UPS (uninterrupted power supply), for capacity, add up the power rating on the NAS unit. If you want to skimp out on the UPS, just get a surge protector, it's your data after all. Here are some pointers: Single drive, direct connection: http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX45802 http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX22324 Dual drive, direct connection: http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX40154 http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX43461 4 drive, direct connection: (do consider the noise of 4 drives spinning near your desktop) http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX30898/Reviews and of course the drobo: http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX42950 Single drive, NAS: http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX32282 http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX33812 Dual drive, NAS: http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX47066 http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX49052 4 drive , NAS: http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX39139 http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX49654 And you still need to get your drives. Generally look for NAS / Storage rated drives, Green rated drives tend to perform poorly in raid environments. Desktop / workstation rated drives will do fine, specially under low/medium stress situations. On May 29, 2014 Thursday 14:22:21 Joe S wrote: > I was reading the reviews of external hard drives. I found a > number had problems with reliability. I don't have experience > with these, but need something for backing up my home computer. > Are there any that can be recommended? I also thought of getting > an enclosure and a regular drive in case I have to replace it > in the future. Probably 1 TB or so. > > > Thanks for suggestions > > _______________________________________________ > clug-talk mailing list > clug-talk@clug.ca > http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca > Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) > **Please remove these lines when replying _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list clug-talk@clug.ca http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
