Decent Hardware RAID solution for Mac

[bsodmike]

Would one be looking at say an attached Western Digital My Book Studio II (1TB, 2TB and 4TB) or maybe a NAS solution like Netgear ReadyNAS Duo or Western Digital ShareSpace ?

Would be looking at RAID 1 mainly...

[shaithis]

Areca RAID cards work in Macs these days, although expensive, they are very nice peices of kit.

[5eb]

Would one be looking at say an attached Western Digital My Book Studio II (1TB, 2TB and 4TB) or maybe a NAS solution like Netgear ReadyNAS Duo or Western Digital ShareSpace ?

Would be looking at RAID 1 mainly...

I use two two-bay QNAPs and do RAID1 on 1.5TB drives from Seagate. Works brilliantly, I have them plugged into my TimeCapsule and stream my media from it. Eventually I will put my iTunes library on it and manage it via TuneRanger - total safety.

I wouldn't want to go back to non-RAID. It's a nice, safe, cosy feeling... ;-)

[bsodmike]

I wouldn't want to go back to non-RAID. It's a nice, safe, cosy feeling... ;-)

I know the feeling. Today I just did my first 1.5 week sync (was busy on Sunday) and everything went smoothly on my two RAID1 units. They will remain I/O and electrically isolated till next week

[peterb]

I use two two-bay QNAPs and do RAID1 on 1.5TB drives from Seagate. Works brilliantly, I have them plugged into my TimeCapsule and stream my media from it. Eventually I will put my iTunes library on it and manage it via TuneRanger - total safety.

I wouldn't want to go back to non-RAID. It's a nice, safe, cosy feeling... ;-)

Well I wouldn't say total safety, you still have a single poiunt of failure in the controller card, and if another error mangles the data on the disk, it is mangled on both. RAID is not really a substitute for backup, although syncing a raid solution to either another RAID or even a single drive is effectively a backup - provided it is kept offline once the backup has been taken.

[5eb]

Well I wouldn't say total safety, you still have a single poiunt of failure in the controller card, and if another error mangles the data on the disk, it is mangled on both. RAID is not really a substitute for backup, although syncing a raid solution to either another RAID or even a single drive is effectively a backup - provided it is kept offline once the backup has been taken.

OK, fair enough - I got a bit over-excited (so much pride in my two NASes ;-)) - BUT: my plan is to do exactly what you recommend: sync it to another RAID configuration. And I'm gonna do it even one step safer: I want to sync my two NASes (3TB total) to a new 5-bay 4.5TB total NAS that resides in a different country (my parents place :-)) - I'll do the first sync when they're on the same network and then ship the 5-bay home and do incremental syns from then on.

One question about that (tell me if I should open a new thread for this): QNAP has a nice sync feature built in that syncs to another QNAP via the www. What are you guys using to sync your NASes?

[ritchiem]

If your going for hardware RAID then you can't go wrong with 3ware cards, just wish I could stop buying harddrives long enough to entertain moving from software raid to hw.

[mosfet]

I'm guessing by the suggestion of a NAS that you don't need performance, if so, take a look at the Drobo deal on Scan today only.

Echoing what others have said, RAID isn't a replacement for back-ups, so use both together.