[Roburt]

I am thinking of getting a RAID 1 set up for my external drives. Looking at OWC, I noticed the New Guardian boxes that are hardware RAID 1, as opposed to the Mercury Elite software RAID units. Any and all comments re: the quality of the New Guardian external HD units would be much appreciated.

Also, would there be any problem using the New Guardian RAID 1 unit as my back-up for time machine? I figure it would just mirror the time machine back up, right?

Finally, I'm thinking of getting Aperture and would like to house my photos on the New Guardian RAID 1 drives so I don't fill up the MBP's internal drive. Is it possible to do this and simultaneously use the New Guardian as my Time Machine backup drive?

[ginoledesma]

I don't have this device per se, but it seems to be using an Oxford bridge chipset that supports HW RAID-1 mirroring. I've used a similar, though older, FW chipset that has this, and it works well enough. I used the FW bridge to for my build-your-own multi-disk enclosure. The option to do single-drives (JBOD) or RAID is toggled in the firmware (which can be uploaded by a Java application).

The Newertech page on the New Guardian RAID enclosure doesn't indicate what types of drives it uses (ATA vs SATA), and from the images I can't tell if it supports hot-swapping of the drives. NewerTech claims plug-and-play ease of use on their page, so maybe it does support hot-swapping. That's one key feature I look for in RAID enclosures, as I would want a truly plug-and-play setup.

As for using it for your TM back-up, it should work perfectly well. As you intend to use the drive for other things as well, I recommend partitioning this new drive, one partition dedicated to your TM backups. That way, you don't share the space with TM and other data, with the possibility of TM using up ALL the space and impacting your workflow.