[Warren Pease]

I've been looking at these two products from OWC for backups. I'm not sure which one I would get yet, but does anyone have any experience with them?

They would be for general backup/RAW images. I'd run them as RAID-1 and 1+0.

FireWire RAID 1 Redundant Mirror Performance FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB 2.0 Storage Solution NewerTech Guardian MAXimus

OWC Mercury Pro Qx2 4-Bay RAID 0/1/5/10 eSATA, FireWire 400/800, USB2 Desktop Removable Bay Storage Solution - up to 8.0TB

I usually buy laptop HD's and memory from them, and I don't have any problems with them as a company, just don't know the quality of their own hardware.

Thanks

[BLAZE_MkIV]

Snow Leopard rendered my CS-406 effectively useless so I looked at the Qx2 as a possibility but after reading several stories of array crashes and multiple RMAs I'm putting together a $200 FreeNAS box because my 10 year old AMD box is too flaky to trust.

[mduell]

I'd suggest using the disks as independent volumes (rysnc'd regularly) rather than relying on the built in RAID. A day old copy of a backup is better than no backup when the $0.20 RAID controller spews corruption.

[Warren Pease]

Hmm, not very encouraging so far...

I was considering this for my parents (who are not likely to do daily backups nor know rsync) for use with TimeMachine. Ideally, I could get them to do a hard backup to some rotating drives every month or so.

I wanted them to have some sense of security that their primary backup would be redundant for their daily purposes.

Is RAID corruption all that common on a simple mirrored setup? I can see the problems that could arise with a more complicated RAID5 where multiple hard-drives are required and possibility of losing a parity bit on 1/4 write attempts for instance. Also, have heard that is more prevalent on software RAID's rather than hardware RAID's.

Thanks for the input BLAZE and mduell

[BLAZE_MkIV]

I got the FreeNAS box to show up.
The AFP server they have has an option that makes the directory show up in time machine. Didn't need to make & copy a disk image like before.

[mduell]

I've had poor results with a variety of low end ($100 for dual drive, $300 for 4-5 drive) enclosures failing in various ways.

For a home situation one copy of the backup is enough. On the off chance you lose it you still have the live copy on disk.