the_river

March 06, 2009 at 9:36am

The WDs My Book World Edition sports a 1TB RAID 0 and 500GB RAID 1 solution..but at the expense of ports.

This Acer looks really nice. If this thing sports RAID 0, 1 and 5 it would be a sweet little box. I'd use RAID 5 with a few 1-2TB drives since they will be cheaper by the time it launches. With a eSATA port, you can dump your current drive(s) data onto it quickly and then set an application up like Acronis to do Incremental file backups to the device over the network for your other files, after imaging the PC for the just incase scenerio. Thanks MaxPC for the suggestion. Just blew away my OS last night and restored my local files back on top of a FRESH Vista install...feels good to know that everything copied 'as it was' and restored 'as it was'. For a power user, that is the ultimate peace of mind.  VALVE folder didn't work properly when restored (did not recognize my game content as being installed) so I am glad a took a backup of L4D through the Steam game content backup itself.

I have tons of video content for video editing, all in AVI format. With the LG Bluray burner, moving files from the Sony HandyCam that a friend brings to me to burn Bluray discs becomes a painstaking process because I can only move so much to create the Bluray project. I can see myself using this to unload my current archived external eSATA enclosure with my archived video files and moving the additional ones off of my video editing drive inside my system. Free up so much space, and at least know that I'm not subject to a single drive failure losing hours of my work.

Not that I don't have spare SATA ports, but I got my Raptor on one controller and the 250GB video drive on the other 'just incase' one controller fails. Had that happen once and the drive wasn't in a RAID either and it killed my data. I just don't feel like setting up a RAID config inside my system. I'd rather have a dedicated NAS with hot swappable hard drives to know my data is safe, and accessible from multiple PCs or a VM environment if necessary.