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Which RAID manufacturer for backup #1
Andrew Mumford's picture
by Andrew Mumford
July 31, 2012 - 9:28am

Since everyones talking about hard drives …

I've always had G-RAID's as a part of my system and despite being raid 0 and theoretically they've always been rock solid and just so damn good, only ever had to send one back for a noisy fan …

Anyway - I'm in the process of recovering from a failed internal drive I had set up as part of a three disk stripe and although Backblaze saved me I'm thinking I should look into a raid 1 mirror so it doesn't take so long next time.

G-Technology used to make one called G-Safe but it's no longer available, I like the idea of a LaCie 2Big but they went through such a bad patch a few years back I'm nervous of committing - does anyone have any “recent”, say past three years experience with them that was positive or negative ?

Thx

---
Andrew Mumford

PhotoJoseph's picture
by PhotoJoseph
July 31, 2012 - 9:45am

Andrew,

I’ve had bad batches of G-Tech drives and had to have several replaced, but the good news is they always replace, and quickly ;-)

I’m actually currently using two G-Tech 2TB drive software striped as RAID 0 as my Time Machine backup, and also backup to Backblaze. Yes I know that’s a pretty risky local backup, but since I have the cloud one too, I feel confident. The only reason I’m set up that way is that I retired my Drobo, got a Promise RAID for my main storage, and had the G-Techs left over. No point buying something else for backup when this works perfectly fine (and I don’t trust the Drobo anymore).

I’m blown away at the value of the Seagate Backup Plus 3TB USB 3 drive that Stuart recommended.

So that’s me… what are the rest of y’all using?

@PhotoJoseph
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Michael Ball's picture
by Michael Ball
July 31, 2012 - 2:18pm

I know lots of people have had problems with Drobo, Joseph included, but I’ve liked mine because I can more easily upgrade drives which is good since I do it when I have the funds available.

As far as O vs 1: Almost any 2 disk array can be used as 1 instead of 0. All the big manufactures support this, WD, LaCie, G-Tech, etc. And if they don’t natively have their own settings to do it, it’s fairly easy in Disk Utility.

Personally, I think that if you’re concerned about drive failures the only solution is to get an enclosure and buy the drives yourselves. G-Tech uses Hitachi drives almost entirely, and LaCie sources from a variety of places. If security is the goal, spending more on higher quality drives is usually the best solution since it’s seldom the enclosure manufacturers whose parts cause data loss. I have a Vantec 2 bay enclosure which had served me well and is very easy to upgrade.

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