[crazy4laptops]

A friend of mine is looking to replace her failed 3TB external disk (Seagate) 1. We're both annoyed it died so fast, 2. data recovery is cutting into the budget also.

I want to put her on an external RAID disk, but they're expensive to buy straight from a brand name. Looking at all seller options for name brands and for building an external array as well, Raid 1 is fine, but if the price is right I'm up for Raid5.

Any thoughts?

[LiveBrianD]

I don't have much experience with this, but one thing's for sure - I do NOT recommend Lacie (I had a NAS from them, and it failed).

[smax013]

crazy4laptops, on 11 January 2013 - 07:16 PM, said:

A friend of mine is looking to replace her failed 3TB external disk (Seagate) 1. We're both annoyed it died so fast, 2. data recovery is cutting into the budget also.

I want to put her on an external RAID disk, but they're expensive to buy straight from a brand name. Looking at all seller options for name brands and for building an external array as well, Raid 1 is fine, but if the price is right I'm up for Raid5.

Any thoughts?

What is your budget?

What kind of interface do you want? I am assuming USB 2.0, but you know what happens when you assume.

What usable capacity?
(note: in many cases the stated capacity of RAID drives is the capacity for both drives total...i.e. if you use it as RAID 0...you typically need to cut the stated value in half if RAID 1...but you will need to double check for the specific drive)

If you want to keep it in the $200 to $400 range, then you are likely looking at RAID 1 only. To get RAID 5, you need three disks in the RAID drive and that likely will mean $500 or more.

[waldojim]

Here is my personal suggestion. Build a dirt cheap NAS box. Use a micro-ATX/ ITX board, like this little foxconn here. Slap on a Pentium dual core chip, about 2~4GB of ram, three hard drives of choice, and then use FREE NAS.

You get all the benefits of RAID, in a completely open, unbound system. Motherboard dies? Replace it with whatever you want. Need to expand your data pool? Slap in a new drive. and so on.

If you really want to go raid, then by all means, go for it. I would suggest AMD A-series systems in that case though.