As long as you are cool with having to re-install, re-rip the games/anime in the event of a disk failure. sounds good to me.
Quick overview of raid (also wikipedia):
Raid (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks) is a way of making more than one physical disk appear as a single disk. There are several different types of raid, and depending on the type, they can accomplish different goals.
For most simple setups we only have to deal with Raid 0 and Raid 1 with 2 physical disks
Raid 0 (also known as scary raid): this takes all your data, and spreads it out evenly across both disks.
Pros: this can be fast (read and write speeds are cumulative) and cheap (you don't 'loose' any data to redundancy)
Cons: if a single disk fails, your are SOL. Which means you can expect catastrophic data loss in roughly 18 months
Raid 1: take all your data, and write it on both disks.
Pros: Fault Tolerance! If one drive dies, you can replace it, and the computer never knows that anything went wrong.
Cons: expensive, you only get use half of disk space you purchased (half being used for redundancy)
With more than 2 disks, you can start to get all sorts of interesting ways to maintain fault tolerance while minimizing the amount of disk space you give up to do so.
But all of them still suffer from the same problem: they don't grow.
Say you have two 1TB drives in a raid 0, and you want to upgrade it to two 2 TB drives. There are very few raid controllers out there that can (cleanly) upgrade the size of disks you work with. And none of them will work with mismatched drives.
Almost always, it's easier to beg/borrow a second raid box, copy everything onto that.
Swap out both disks in current raid with new larger disks (losing the contents in the process).
And then copy everything back.
Which is why I've become a fan of drobo. They solve that problem.
Yes, they are more expensive (cheapest thing they offer is $350) but being able to swap drives in and out as I need more storage is a lifesaver, and their build quality is top notch.
I went through two different low end dumb raid boxes (one due to repeated raid failures, and one due to inability to cool itself) before I said screw it. Backup is supposed to remove stress from my life, not add it.
I've bought two drobos so far, one for me, one for my parents. And I haven't had a single problem with them.
-Terry
-----
"so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today"
TF2: Spy
Quick overview of raid (also wikipedia):
Raid (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks) is a way of making more than one physical disk appear as a single disk. There are several different types of raid, and depending on the type, they can accomplish different goals.
For most simple setups we only have to deal with Raid 0 and Raid 1 with 2 physical disks
Raid 0 (also known as scary raid): this takes all your data, and spreads it out evenly across both disks.
Pros: this can be fast (read and write speeds are cumulative) and cheap (you don't 'loose' any data to redundancy)
Cons: if a single disk fails, your are SOL. Which means you can expect catastrophic data loss in roughly 18 months
Raid 1: take all your data, and write it on both disks.
Pros: Fault Tolerance! If one drive dies, you can replace it, and the computer never knows that anything went wrong.
Cons: expensive, you only get use half of disk space you purchased (half being used for redundancy)
With more than 2 disks, you can start to get all sorts of interesting ways to maintain fault tolerance while minimizing the amount of disk space you give up to do so.
But all of them still suffer from the same problem: they don't grow.
Say you have two 1TB drives in a raid 0, and you want to upgrade it to two 2 TB drives. There are very few raid controllers out there that can (cleanly) upgrade the size of disks you work with. And none of them will work with mismatched drives.
Almost always, it's easier to beg/borrow a second raid box, copy everything onto that.
Swap out both disks in current raid with new larger disks (losing the contents in the process).
And then copy everything back.
Which is why I've become a fan of drobo. They solve that problem.
Yes, they are more expensive (cheapest thing they offer is $350) but being able to swap drives in and out as I need more storage is a lifesaver, and their build quality is top notch.
I went through two different low end dumb raid boxes (one due to repeated raid failures, and one due to inability to cool itself) before I said screw it. Backup is supposed to remove stress from my life, not add it.
I've bought two drobos so far, one for me, one for my parents. And I haven't had a single problem with them.
-Terry
-----
"so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today"
TF2: Spy