I have around 3TB of multimedia scattered across 8 drives on 2 different machines. Last night one of my 500GB drives ate itself and I'm once again thinking about RAID/backup solutions to prevent this from happening again.
I've been reading forums and window shopping at newegg for a couple of days now and the right thing to do has yet to jump out and reveal itself.
So my question is, given the following situation, and a budget of less than $1000, what would you do?
The Situation:
- 2 computers to work with (my desktop and my media center), both can hold 6 drives each and have plenty of SATA ports.
- Already have 6 500GB drives, 1 750GB drive, 1 640GB drive. All are full or close to full.
- One of the 500GB drives just died.
- I am extremely technically competent, but have no hands-on experience with RAID.
I feel like RAID 5 is just going to lead to more problems. However, RAID 1/mirroring on disk seems like an enormous waste of space (maybe this is just flawed logic on my part?). So I'm really not sure what to do. It would be nice to have something that "just works".
What would you do?
I've been reading forums and window shopping at newegg for a couple of days now and the right thing to do has yet to jump out and reveal itself.
So my question is, given the following situation, and a budget of less than $1000, what would you do?
The Situation:
- 2 computers to work with (my desktop and my media center), both can hold 6 drives each and have plenty of SATA ports.
- Already have 6 500GB drives, 1 750GB drive, 1 640GB drive. All are full or close to full.
- One of the 500GB drives just died.
- I am extremely technically competent, but have no hands-on experience with RAID.
I feel like RAID 5 is just going to lead to more problems. However, RAID 1/mirroring on disk seems like an enormous waste of space (maybe this is just flawed logic on my part?). So I'm really not sure what to do. It would be nice to have something that "just works".
What would you do?