Looking for a bit of useful input and knowledge from an experienced user pls

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

Given the current debarcle with mavericks and WD i am left feeling a little overwhelmed with regards to how to proceed having lost all of the data on one of my drives. I have managed to recover 90% of the data with Data Rescue 3 but i have lost all of my organisation which will never really be able to be restored.

  1. From the top my current set up is 4 x MyBook Studio II’s @ 2 x 1TB running RAID 1. i was thinking of purchasing a synology NAS and setting up a 4TB cloud mirror using Superduper… but that whole set up is £450! but atleast i will be running two brands of RAID… but at the same time I am not so hot on the idea of having a slow NAS drive… i am used to firewire transfer speeds.

I am trying to avoid the expenditure so am thinking of buying 4 x 3TB drives which will pratically replace atleast 3 of my existing drives with one enclosure - then with the second enclosure create a full mirror of that drive which i will only switch on when Superduper schedules a backup keeping it off the grid in the majority so to speak… This way i feel is cost effective making use of the hardware i have, and also a good level of safety as in theory i will have 4 versions of the same drive.

What do you think of this idea? and do you have any alternatives for me? data security and networking is a real headache!

  1. this whole RAID thing has me a little nervous, i see RAID0 as useless and actually increases the risk of failure… RAID5 seems ovely complicated for what i need… and RAID1 as just right although expensive and limiting, sizewise.  So say one of the HDD’s fails using RAID 1… i literally pop out the faulty drive install a new one and it remirrors onto the clean drive without the use of a computer?.. how does the enclosure know which one to clone? i cant really find any practical info other than the mybook manual but id prefer to see it in action.

  2. Can you hotswap 2 drives between mybook studio enclosures? If I take a 2 drive RAID1 array out of the enclosure and drop in another 2 drives with their own array, will they just work and i will be able to acces their data without them attempting to rewrite or format themselves?

Sorry if any of this is entry level concerns… im a n00b.

Thanks!

2

si-guy wrote:

Given the current debarcle with mavericks and WD i am left feeling a little overwhelmed with regards to how to proceed having lost all of the data on one of my drives. I have managed to recover 90% of the data with Data Rescue 3 but i have lost all of my organisation which will never really be able to be restored.

 

  1. From the top my current set up is 4 x MyBook Studio II’s @ 2 x 1TB running RAID 1. i was thinking of purchasing a synology NAS and setting up a 4TB cloud mirror using Superduper… but that whole set up is £450! but atleast i will be running two brands of RAID… but at the same time I am not so hot on the idea of having a slow NAS drive… i am used to firewire transfer speeds.

 

I am trying to avoid the expenditure so am thinking of buying 4 x 3TB drives which will pratically replace atleast 3 of my existing drives with one enclosure - then with the second enclosure create a full mirror of that drive which i will only switch on when Superduper schedules a backup keeping it off the grid in the majority so to speak… This way i feel is cost effective making use of the hardware i have, and also a good level of safety as in theory i will have 4 versions of the same drive.

 

What do you think of this idea? and do you have any alternatives for me? data security and networking is a real headache!

 

 

 

  1. this whole RAID thing has me a little nervous, i see RAID0 as useless and actually increases the risk of failure… RAID5 seems ovely complicated for what i need… and RAID1 as just right although expensive and limiting, sizewise.  So say one of the HDD’s fails using RAID 1… i literally pop out the faulty drive install a new one and it remirrors onto the clean drive without the use of a computer?.. how does the enclosure know which one to clone? i cant really find any practical info other than the mybook manual but id prefer to see it in action.

 

 

  1. Can you hotswap 2 drives between mybook studio enclosures? If I take a 2 drive RAID1 array out of the enclosure and drop in another 2 drives with their own array, will they just work and i will be able to acces their data without them attempting to rewrite or format themselves?

 

 

Sorry if any of this is entry level concerns… im a n00b.

 

Thanks!

1.  It isn’t until you lose important data that you really start thinking in terms of data management.  You obviously were doing everything you knew to do to manage your data, so I really feel your pain.  I have done everything I know to avoid using raid drives, but as the need for more and more storage arises, it will become a necessary evil.  There are some drives out there that actually use JBOD (just a bunch of disks).  If you were to back that type of drive up, like you’re thinking above, if the external drive goes down, you still have the data on the drives inside.  If one of the internal drives goes down, then you have the data copied on another drive. 

2. I agree with you about raid 0, which is usually built more for transfer speed that security.  However, RAID 5 is good if one of the disks does down, because you still have your data, and the security gets rebuilt when the bad drive gets replaced.  However, if two drives goes down, well, sorry.  RAID 1 is good because if the raid dies, then you have your data on two drives.  If a drive dies, then you still have your data on the other drive.

3. You never want to hotswap any drive unless the manufacturer says you can hotswap a drive on an external enclosure.  However, if you mean can you take out those drives and use them in another enclosure, or in an array, then yeah, you should be able to do that.  If you mean to use them with another two drives, then that depends on if the drives are all the same.