Recovering from the trauma WD caused by cancelling the My Book Live deal, can anyone else suggest what's a good option for a harddrive set-up with huge space (6 or 8TB) on RAID1?
Alternatively, can I buy two 4TB external drives and set them up as RAID1? If so, how?
How about using 2 existing portable external HDD as RAID1? any experience with that?
None. You will need a RAID controller to get RAID drives. This is included inside these RAID cases, which then communicates to the outside world via USB or e-SATA etc. Some motherboards have RAID controllers on them, but you need to hang the RAID drives directly off the controller to take advantage of this. Otherwise they will just be multiple independent drives. There are many types of RAID. What do you want? Just lots of storage, or a massive single virtual drive? Do you need data redundancy, or a combination of all of these?
Ok. To get raid 1 with 6-8tb you need a 4 bay raid drive.
Basically raid 0+1. You ll need 4x 3tb to create 6tb raid or 4x 4tb to create a 8tb raid. Vantec nst-640-s3r does this.
If you are using portable drive you need to remove the internal drive and buy a 2.5in to 3.5 in drive coverter before you use these drives.
Personally i brought the nst-400mx-s3r dual raid drive and put 2x 4tb drives in it.
Thanks endotherm and Nutrino
All I need is a large HDD (4TB) worth of usable storage, and a mirror copy (thus RAID1, of 4TB). Doesnt need to be fast, just normal HDD speed.
I use a laptop, thus no internal storage space. Only USB.
You can get external cases for around $100 such as http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&p… which will allow you to install standard drives to do what you want. It will give you the option of RAID0, 1, JBOD, single-mode etc. Also has e-SATA. Not sure how that compares price-wise to the WD deal.