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I don't understand the point of a two-drive RAID enclosure. The only Mac sold now that will work with it is a Mac Pro, which has four internal bays that makes for faster and easier-to-install RAID internally.
Note to companies: If you want to build a RAID enclosure, how about making something affordable with four to eight bays? Note: affordable means that your case costs less than a full-tower PC builder system.

No FW800? Huh.

It would make more sense if it had an ethernet port on it (Gb)... Then you could use it as an 'off system' backup location. Restricting it to a direct connect makes it pretty pointless (as mentioned above).
Oh, and those 4+ drive capacity enclosures... Make sure they support MORE than just RAID 0 and 1... RAID 5 should be standard issue on such items, with RAID 6 (5 with hot spare) being a nice addition...

chomxxo said:

What if your bays are already full? What if you have a laptop? Or, even better, what if you're a creative professional and have to transport extremely large files back and forth to people? My friend is a movie producer and to transport the raw footage for his short film (25 minutes) he needed to use my little 250GB WD Passport. Can you imagine a major full feature film? A multi-TB RAID would likely be necessary.

Personally, I want a 2-bay RAID because Hitachi has a new 1.5TB 3.5" drive coming out this month and a 1.5TB mirrored RAID would suit me very fine, for now anyway. 4-Bays, as you've said yourself, are horribly expensive and often require a lot of extra hardware.

Personally I can't wait until Mac OS X supports ZFS since that will remove all need for RAID, or at least that's the impression I'm getting.

I'd rather get the Seagate 1.5TB drives when they start shipping (also within the month)... I've seen too many hitachi drives fail. Seagate has proven a much more reliable device, PLUS they have 5 year warranties on ALL their drives.



I'll be looking to get a 4 bay network attached RAID system (most likely by Linksys, the NSS4000 or NSS6000) and load it up with either 1TB or 1.5TB drives and set it to use RAID 5.



ZFS won't remove the need for RAID, since it's a software (software RAID sucks, no two ways about it) solution. RAID 5 is much, much better. You get the performance of RAID 0 but you get the last drive for parity which protects your data. You use four drives and get the size of three of them.

akira34 said:

I was not aware Seagate was going to release a 1.5TB drive, thanks for the news! They are my brand of choice but I ddn't think they had one ready yet.

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I'm thinking something similar but if I can get it done with only two drives I will. Needs will dictate I guess.

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It's my understanding, which very well might be wrong, that ZFS is a bit different than a software RAID in that it's defined by the file system instead of by the OS so for all intensive purposes it acts the same as a hardware RAID. Though, the main reason I'm looking at ZFS is because of all the other benefits it's rumoured to have over other file systems.

My only concern is if it could work like a RAID 5 array since that's my end goal. 1TB+ of data is great and all but I've lost that much before and would rather not do it again.

Never buy Western Digital...

Agreed, RAID 5, 6, and 10 support are mandatory. Too many manufacturers are selling products that make no practical sense for users with large amounts of data.

If you are transporting a RAID array around, I think you'll find that your data may not last very long in a RAID 0 configuration. Redundancy probably wouldn't be worth the extra heft in that case (RAID 1).
The assumption that ZFS will replace hardware RAID is incorrect, but it would be a step in the right direction.

For info on the Seagate drive look here: http://www.seagate.c...000f5ee0a0aRCRD


As for the person wanting a large amount of storage and be able to carry it around, the box is not really a viable option (even without the right support for RAID and such)... Better off getting one of G-Technologies setups with 400GB or 500GB inside in a small package. I have a couple of their mini drives (250GB each) which offer FW400, FW800 and USB2 connections. You can get their G-RAID mini drives up to 500GB capacity, or a G-RAID2 in up to 2TB in a much smaller footprint than the drive mentioned in the above article. From what I can see, the G-Tech device is about half the height of the one from Sans Digital...

All the people I know that are serious about video, or photography, and want to maintain their files in reliable storage all gravitate towards the G-Tech devices. Personally, I build my own storage devices (99% of the time) using Seagate drives. Over the past 8 years of using those drives (pretty much exclusively) I've only had a single one begin to go south. Seagate replaced it with ease AND with a larger drive. This was about four or five years ago now, and I've not had a single drive issue since then. I've purchased either for myself, or the company I work for, at least 100 Seagate drives over the past four+ years... No failures (of the drive) to deal with...

Thanks for the info about the Seagate drives, it pretty much reenforces everything I've heard about them to date. They are high capacity, high performance and high reliability. How are they on power consumption?

G-Technologies looks like it has some nice products, though the only one that goes above 1TB that isn't the massive one only does RAID 0.

Personally, I'm looking at San Disk, Stardom, Synology and Fusion. Since I don't plan on buying for a few months yet at least I'm in no real rush though. Can anyone speak for or against any of these brands?

Firewire should be standard on all external drive devices both 400 and 800. It's superior to USB 2.0 and all Macs can use it where as SATA can only be used on the Mac Pro. USB is to slow!

And what about Drobo?
Oh, and another thing; I always thought that USB2 compares to FW400 in terms of speed. The only protocol being faster is FW800 or eSATA.
The reviewed storage box is bulky and ugly, not my cup of tea.