1Tb of portable storage required

[ArthurDaley]

Best option seems to be Western Digital My Book Pro 1terabyte Dual-Drive storage System http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-1terabyte-Dual-Drive-storage/dp/tech-data/B000...331983-0534854

Before I hit buy, any opinions? This DV is eating my drives. I need it to be portable and two drive systems are OK (1 preferred!), but certainly not 4*250 as in the Buffalo option. I'm a bit concerned about the noise of this unit though, going by reviews although I see on the WD site a firmware upgrade that is meant to help a little.

[Scorpion King]

It looks like a 1terabyte mirror raid box containing 2 x 500GB drives. The mirror raid array will decrease your storage capacity by 1/2. In this case it will make an exact copy of the 1st drive onto the second. Is 500GB enough free space is the question.

Running the mirror means you will probably never loose the data. If one drive fails the box should warn you of the drive failure. You replace the failed drive with a new one then hit the 'rebuild array' button. The program should then do the rest (the mirror image copy). Should that is...

I like the 'mirror array in a box' idea. And I also like WD.

Good luck.

[ArthurDaley]

I like WD (good experiences hence considering them again for external storage) but I think I will take the chance to run it without mirroring.

As for the noise issue I see firmware upgrades here:

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1482&p_created=1164731298

[edDV]

I've recently built a Core2Duo experimental machine and have been testing various consumer storage solutions. What I'm finding is external drives slow things down considerably.

Assuming you can get at the full 1TB with that box, use the fastest connection. That may be 800Mb Firewire.

So far I have discovered

- USB2 is slow and CPU intensive no matter what you do. Everything is waiting for the drive.

- IEEE-1394 400 runs faster with less CPU activity. Firewire 800 not tried.

- Gigabit Ethernet needs fast CPU at both ends. My remote computers go to 100% CPU with only 25-35% Gigabit rates.

- External SATA looks promising but I haven't got one yet.

- From the work side, I know Fibrechannel works but that is too expensive for home.


PS: I should add context for what I'm doing. I'm trying to move large DV, HDV or MPeg2_TS format files machine to machine and drive to drive. Second, I'd like to encode to DVD MPeg2 from any drive on any machine without first moving the file. That is where my hopes were with Gigabit Ethernet. Any help for increasing speed would be much appreciated.

[Scorpion King]

The reasons EdDV stats is exactly why I'm running 6 internals. I did put in the bigger power supply to handle the extra loads and the extra fans to rid the case of the added heat. I have had no problems. But you say you need portability..... Do you need the entire TB to be portable?

Transporting hard disk drives.... I would consider the mirror array for the added safety. lol

p.s. Thanks for the spell check Baldrick. Really nice addition.