Portable RAID 0 and 1 enclosure drive recommendation?

Retrospective

Retrospective

Well-known member
Hey guys,

I've had it with G-RAID Mini, this is my 2nd one and it started not to mount again. I've lost an entire short I was editing :( So dissapointed, I am never buying G-Tech products again. I've read so many RMA's they have to process because so much is being returned.

I am never going to buy 'closed' solution again. I'd like to get an enclosure and buy my own hard drives.

I still don't have the budget to make a good RAID system like this one: http://lifezero.typepad.com/blog/2008/10/super-fast-4tb-raid-for-under-2k.html

But I am looking for anything under $500. Any recommendation?

Thanks!
 
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I'm afraid you just aren't going to find top quality performance under $500 in a RAID solution.

Depending on your needs you may want to look into other solutions.

If you're doing this for speed like say scratch drives, you may want to look into solid state drives.

If this is for redundancy you may want to look into a very basic setup like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816131003

with a few of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136320

Of course you'd still have to worry about adequate space in your case, power supply, heat, etc. In which case you could just buy a seperate case and power supply to house the drives and link it with a few SATA to Esata adapters...even my solution would go to around 700-800.....there are ways to make RAID cheaper, but I wouldn't suggest it.....and 4tb? not gonna happen. Think more like 1-1.5
 
Nick Walters said:
I'm afraid you just aren't going to find top quality performance under $500 in a RAID solution.

Depending on your needs you may want to look into other solutions.

If you're doing this for speed like say scratch drives, you may want to look into solid state drives.

If this is for redundancy you may want to look into a very basic setup like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816131003

with a few of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136320

Of course you'd still have to worry about adequate space in your case, power supply, heat, etc. In which case you could just buy a seperate case and power supply to house the drives and link it with a few SATA to Esata adapters...even my solution would go to around 700-800.....there are ways to make RAID cheaper, but I wouldn't suggest it.....and 4tb? not gonna happen. Think more like 1-1.5
Click to expand...
Thanks for the suggestions! I know I wont find a top quality RAID solution under $500.

Right now I edit on my laptop (Macbook Pro) so I need a 2 drive RAID 0 enclosure as a scratch drive, it doesn't matter if its 3.5" or 2.5" drives or if it even requires an external power source. I just need one that WORKS and wont go kaput in a month or so.

Im not sure if a single drive with FW400 would be sufficient as a scratch disk?
 
CalDigit is (IMO) the best out there. But you have to use their drives, you can't just swap your own drives in and out.
 
If this is for a scratch disk, I think you should seriously consider not using RAID, but instead going with a Solid State Disc like this one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231243

Or something similar....

This will enable you to have a simple, high quality, extremely shock resistant, portable system that appears like it's an everyday external drive, but in reality is an insanely fast piece of Solid State equipment.
 
Sounds like price is important and so is reliability...uh...not always in the same package.

I've been on OWC/MacSales drives since 2003 with zero failures. Including the portable, bus-powered 60GB drive that survived four months in Iraq.

Yeah, well, there's that 2007 1TB RAID 0 whose fan is making some funky noise at start-up, but it's still writing/reading flawlessly.

I probably have about 8-9 TB by now in both single drives and RAID 0 boxes. I like the idea of having separate power supplies for each drive or RAID.

All my data is backed up 100%, meaning, I suggest if you want 1 TB of storage, buy 2. Or, if you're REALLY paranoid, buy 3.

All hard drives will fail...hopefully just not at the same time.

Lee
 
I'm assuming that since you have a MacBook Pro that you want external storage that has a FireWire 800 connection, right? One concern I have is that a fast RAID 0 set-up with 1TB drives will be bottlenecked (at least while under 50-60% capacity) even by the ~80MBps speed on FW 800.

So, I guess the question then is why do you want RAID 0? An even better question might be, what needs do you need to meet?
 
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