Thanks for the great responses. I was originally thinking of this as a DIY project but perhaps I'll check out the LaCie.

Check out infrant. ReadyNAS X6 looks interesting--its a raid-5 that lets you use different size drives and add storage as you grow. It automatically reconfigures the raid if you add or replace a disc. Buy the box and add up to 4 drives as you need them.

www.infrant.com

I've done what you are asking about using Ximeta NDAS devices. The setup is Raid 1.

I store all of our ripped CD's (FLAC format), video from digital camera and old analog, digital pictures, and shows moved off our ReplayTv's. I have close to a terrabyte of storage hanging off the home LAN.

Check out Ximeta.

RAID is not a backup strategy. All it takes is an errant deletion, fs corruption, or virus and all that content you spent $$$ to protect is gone.

Use of the unattached array for full and incremental backups would be somewhat fine, though, with primary storage on a separate local device.

I wouldn't use RAID as a backup. I'd use it for storage, but your backups should be on removable media, DVD's or whatever.

I wouldn't mess with it at all to build one unless you are really bored, just buy one off the shelve.

If all you want is static storage, there are removable options that may work, like the 90 GB Iomega removable drives, just keep getting more 90 GB carts whenever you need them.

Got to give a :td: to ximeta. Had one of their 120gb netdisks, it lasted 14 months before going belly up. Warranty is only 1 year! :eek: Their Bangalore tech support was very unhelpful, no exceptions, sorry, you're SOL.

Granted this is one person's experience, but...

Heh, I almost wrote something like that ("RAID is not a backup strategy") last night, but I was feeling too tired and not confident enough to defend it. I have read those words before.

I wasn't really thinking about it clearly last night and didn't express it, but it is worth clarifying that a RAID, even a RAID-1 mirror or RAID-5, shouldn't be your only storage device. You still want some backup, or it can be the backup to the primary storage. That is, at least if you want the best chance to not lose something. RAID is for performance and/or uptime and/or cost (see below).

Let's think about this again after sleeping on it. You have a few hundred gigs of data. You can now get single spindle external drives at 500GB each. Maybe two of those, one for primary and one for backup, with some basic software to automate the backup (so it runs in the middle of the night when it won't disrupt you), would be the way to go. Keeps things simple, takes RAID out of the equation. Again an example from LaCie: http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10511 In this case I've actually used drives of smaller capacity in that enclosure. Very solid, comes with all the cables you need. You can see that a 500GB drive still has a price premium. It's more than twice as much as two 300GB drives, so if you can go smaller, you can save some dough. Heck, just get 4 smaller ones. Note in the LaCie line, everything that says Big Disk or Bigger Disk has a RAID-0 inside, thus defeating the purpose of getting single drives. (What they've done to reduce the risk of that setup I don't know. Thus, it's hard to recommend here.) It does make them cheaper, though. The same amount of space can be had for less $$ by grouping a couple of small drives together. A big single spindle still commands a hefty premium.

Some may say (have already looks like) that you shouldn't use a hard drive as final backup, but I don't find archiving all that useful. The iomega removable may be somewhat more archival, but I'd rather have continual backup of what I'm doing than archive. The best is both, but I've never found myself wishing for archives of stuff I've deleted. I either want to keep it or I don't. Thus, frequent automated backup to something that's easy (like a hard drive) feels best to me. Two hard drives is enough redundancy for most stuff. There is a place for archiving in the event of corruption, virus damage, accidental deletion, etc., certainly. I choose to forgo that layer for myself.

For backup software my favorite is Data Backup http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_backup.php Has several options and good scheduling. $59 isn't the cheapest around, though. SuperDuper is highly regarded and possibly similarly capable for $19. I personally haven't tried it. http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDup...scription.html

The ReadyNAS that mikel51 recommended is really slick. It was reviewed by Ars Technica here and Tom's Hardware here. They both really liked it. If you're going to spend over $500, I'd definitely go with NAS over something that hangs off firewire/usb.

I would recommend RAID5 for home use. It seems to provide the best cost/reliablity mix for home use.

To expand on the details ClueByFour posted, Raid 1 (disk mirroring) in a USB enclosure is soon to become available at the consumer level. Picture a standard USB external hard drive enclosure (as they exist today) but with two disk drives that are easily changed out or replaced.

Check newegg.com or zipzoomfly.com for these devices, I saw one on there a few months ago, and I read some more are available.

Here is a graphic explaination of raid options: http://www.vogon-international.com/d...ecovery-04.htm

I have to give Ximeta a ^ . I have a 160mb NetDisk that's going strong after 2 yrs - and it has not been turned off since going online! For stuff I want to have access to via my home gigabit LAN, from 3 other computers in different rooms in the house, it's the way to go - always online. Of course it's not used as an archive drive.

redjr...

Excellent point. RAID will protect your data against hardware failures such as disk crashes. It will not do a thing to protect it against operator or software errors, since those will do the same thing (whatever it is) to both copies. That's why separate backups are a good idea. For static data like this, once you have those, the added hardware-only reliability of RAID is not needed.

My Ximeta's are going strong, with no issues, hence my recommendation. Let me clarify my configuration. I use Ximeta's for online storage. My personal policy is to backup my online storage at least once a month, or when major changes occur to DVD Nero's backup utility. Raid as fisherman said is not a backup strategy. The Raid 1 in concert with a backup strategy gives me a warm and fuzzy that my data will not disappear.

I agree, RAID should be viewed more from a online data redundancy aspect as opposed to pure backup. Backup in this case really being archival storage. A separate offline drive, and DL-DVDs works for me just fine for my archival strategy. Of course, will THEY even be readable 20 yrs from now?

redjr...

Not likely -

I don't think you need RAID at all. Just buy an external hard drive. I make my own external drives by buying USB hard drive enclosures and cheap internal IDE drives at Fry's Electronics (not everyone has a Fry's near them). For example, I've been buying 200GB IDE drives for about $40 each (after rebate) recently. These are Seagate drives with 5-year warranties. I take the strategy of having numerous drives and numerous backups of my photo archive, expecting any one drive to die (and then be replaced under the warranty).

There is great backup software out there, such as True Image from Acronis. It will make an exact image of a hard drive and store it on another hard drive. It will also do incremental backups and you can even schedule them. For example, if you have a 400GB backup drive and you have 200GB of videos now, the first image file you make will include all 200GB of videos. If you add two video files next week and re-run incremental backup, the new backup includes only the added files.

True Image is great for making an exact image of your computer hard drive because it allows a complete restoration in the event of upgrade or hard drive failure without having to re-install Windows. But for copying large amounts of data it might not be very efficient, as it would be making very very large single-file backups.

Another alternative might be a nifty program called "rsync." This is traditionally a UNIX/Linux copy program but there is a Windows version (which I haven't yet tried). It will make an exact copy of a directory somewhere else. The second time you run it it copies only the changes, so it is very efficient. In UNIX, it is a lifesaver. It's also completely free, at least the Linux version is, probably the Windows version is also. Do a Google for it.