After dealing with the old Seagate 1.5 tb hard drives and their problems I decided to go with some of the very reliable and very fast Western Digital Cavair 1tb “black” hard drives. The WD1001FALS drive is one of the fastest and has become one of the most reliable 7200 RPM hard drives out in the market, almost as bomber as their server class drives but at consumer level pricing. Right now they are available for $99 making these a no brainer. I’m stoked I’m finally replacing my slow old Seagate 1.5 tb drives with these new WesternDigital HD’s. A fast and reliable hard drive has become more important to me since my entire liveliehood is on these drives.
I already have a RAID 1 system to automatically write data to two hard drives at the same time for an automatic backup which has already saved me a few times with some previous drive failures. Since then I’d never work without the RAID as it’s saved me from the time in downloading from my web backup or my other backup site. I’m able to keep working as I just put in a new matching drive and the RAID1 system automatically copies over all the data from the working drive to the new drive.
Now I just have to wait for all the data from the old drives to the new drives so I can get going on retiring my other old 500 gb RAID 1array and get back to work.
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so you’ve got your running drive, then two mirrored drives in a RAID? no off site backup in case of household explosions or theft?
Reuben, I have (4) 1tb hard drives in (2) seperate RAID 1 arrays. Basically they are (2) 1tb drives, each being mirrored to a backup as they are written to. Also in the tower are a 74gb 10,000 RPM Raptor HD for a startup and another for a scratch disk as well as another 250gb drive for random stuff like music.
I have the RAID array’s backed up on seperate drives stored on-site in a fireproof safe, and also on a web backup, which is backed up off site as well. Think that’s paranoid? Wait till you lose photos for the first time.
hey erik
do you have any recommendations for a raid 1 array? I’m looking at setting one up rather than all the external drives I’ve been using. Any suggestions would be great.
cheers
jb
Hey Jamie, it depends on if you want to go with a external or internal solution. Also if you are looking for external, if you want an eSATA, or FW800 depending on if you are plugging into a laptop, or a desktop machine. There are pre-built external drives out there that are setup to do a RAID 1 right out of the box but offers no scalability. Western Digital makes a few of these. The solution for an external, scalable system is out there but you have to buy the enclosure (which usually comes with it’s own eSATA interface card that you’d need to plug into a desktop) that allows you to put whatever 3.5″ desktop hard drives into the enclosure. If you have a Windows machine there are a lot of options out there.
If you are running a Mac system, I’d recommend sticking with things you really know were designed for Mac’s. One of which is the OWC Mercury Pro – it is very scalable, allowing you to put in 4 hard drives to run 2 seperate arrays as well as having options for everything to plug it into your computer. FW800/400, eSATA and USB 2.0. A smaller but not as scalable solution is the Guardian Maximus – This enclosure offers the same input options to the computer but is only for 2 drives. It is however something where you can easily swap out drives with for scalability options. Those are a few, there are more out there of course.
If you just don’t care about scalability then I’d go with the 4gb Western Digital My Book Studio Edition. It has all the computer interfacing options the enclosures above have, but there are quality drives already built in there and ready to go. Plug and play. You can run it as a single drive-like setup using both 2gb drives in a normal read/write mode (JBOD) for a 4gb setup or run them in RAID 1 and have a mirrored drive setup for 2GB.
Hope that helps.
Thanks for sharing your experience erik. Not backup thing can be quite complicated…I have work it out soon !!
If you want something that’s just easy, the WD My Book Studio Edition or a Drobo is the way to go. Simple, mindless. Drobo is a bit pricey though. http://www.drobo.com
Seagate has really disappointed recently, and I and still holding my breath for my 1TB FreeAgent drive as its twin, my brother’s, already failed completely once.
WD has had some rocky points in its past, but it’s been pretty consistent for a long time.
RAID is definitely not optional for your storage needs.
Yes, it is a bummer. Guess that’s what happens when they take over Maxtor and their prices drop. Now we are getting Maxtor’s I guess. Back to WD it seems…
Thank you for your article
Hi Erik,
Nice work on your main site !
After just going thru 5 – FIVE – 5 failed Seagates in a row, including some of their so-called Enterprise drives, I just switched over to a bunch of new WD RE4 2TB Enterprise drives. Yes, a bit more expensive than the Caviars, but a tiny price to pay for secure storage. I’ll never buy Seagate again….
Matthew