Good value RAID 1 setup?

RichyX

Planning to buy myself 2 of these hard drives.

Can anyone recommend a good RAID enclosure to go with them?

Firewire 800 would be nice, as would USB 3.0 for future compatibility.

As a cheap option with limited features I'm considering this one.

coylemj

1. Try to go for 7200 RPM drives if you can, there is a big performance difference

2. That enclosure is advertised as JBOD (just a bunch of disks) so doesn't appear to have any RAID capability.

RichyX

coylemj wrote: »

1. Try to go for 7200 RPM drives if you can, there is a big performance difference

2. That enclosure is advertised as JBOD (just a bunch of disks) so doesn't appear to have any RAID capability.

Cheers for the reply.

Yeah, think you're right about the 7200rpm drives. It'll end up being used for video editing, so the speed will be handy.

True, should have read the details more closely.

Any suggestions as to a decent enclosure?

vibe666

http://www.elara.ie/products/detailsfull.asp?productcode=MMEV930846

i have the 4 bay version with the same drives (4x HDD's in RAID5) and it's wicked fast, over 100MB/s sustained transfer, although that may be my SSD being the bottleneck.

mine came with a port multiplier/multilane pci express esata controller so i'm sure that helps speed wise. not sure if the 2 bay one has one as well tho, so you might want to check first.

the worst bit about formatting it was seeing 550gb disappear into the 'formatted capacity void'. :eek:

i know i never really had it to begin with, but it's still a bit of a shock.

RichyX

I'm new to RAID, so will there be any issues with using an enclosure with a MacBook Pro?
Obviously I can't easily make use of a pci express card.

vibe666

aha, that's slightly different then, sorry.

i assume that you have an esata port on your macbook pro?

also, i got the link wrong for the 2 bay enclosure i had meant to show you (fixed the link now): http://www.elara.ie/products/detailsfull.asp?productcode=MMEV930846

you could still use the drive, but i'm not sure if there is a mac version of the raid config app.

you only need it to do the initial raid config tho, once that's done your OS should just see the enclosure as a single disk. i have a win7 laptop with esata and it sees the raid5 volume on my enclosure even though i initially configured it on my desktop pc and the laptop doesn't have the raid manager app installed at all.

RichyX

vibe666 wrote: »

i assume that you have an esata port on your macbook pro?

also, i got the link wrong for the 2 bay enclosure i had meant to show you (fixed the link now): http://www.elara.ie/products/detailsfull.asp?productcode=MMEV930846

you could still use the drive, but i'm not sure if there is a mac version of the raid config app.

you only need it to do the initial raid config tho, once that's done your OS should just see the enclosure as a single disk. i have a win7 laptop with esata and it sees the raid5 volume on my enclosure even though i initially configured it on my desktop pc and the laptop doesn't have the raid manager app installed at all.

I have a defective esata card that I need to get replaced, so stuck with usb 2.0 at present.

Downloaded the manual and drivers for that RAID enclosure. The manual says it's OS X compatible, but there are no Mac drivers included.

Seems I need to do a whole load more research before going ahead with this.

vibe666

RichyX wrote: »

Seems I need to do a whole load more research before going ahead with this.

well, you certainly have my sympathy if it makes you feel any better.

been through the same thing getting mine sorted, but i think i made the right choice in the end. just waiting for my NAS supplier to release a firmware upgrade to allow me to directly connect my external enclosure to that as i'm using it as a backup for the NAS, but at present I need to have it connected to a PC as despite having an esata host port, my NAS doesn't support GPT formatted disk volumes on it's current firmware.

it never rains but it pours.