[swordfish86]

what is an xserve, and a raid, are they basically big organis HDs, just want some info as i am a frelance graphic designer, and rely on my 5 external lacies which is getting very un organised, and it sems silly to have so many externals, any info on these would b great as this could be somthing i might consider loking into, to accompany my mac pro

[ISOsceles]

xraid is exactly that it is a raid server...nothing but Hard drive's but you need a Fibre Channel pciE card to run it....very spensive about 500 for the card and then 3 to 5 grand for the raid so it is quite a bit more expensive than external's. Have you thought of making a Raid in your Mac Pro try a 74 Gb raptor for your boot disk then 3 750gb seagate's, one for backup/storage then the other 2 as a raid 0 ! try it a lot cheaper alternative if you dont need 7 terabytes of ****in storage!

[OreoCookie]

Originally Posted by ISOsceles 

xraid is exactly that it is a raid server...nothing but Hard drive's but you need a Fibre Channel pciE card to run it....very spensive about 500 for the card and then 3 to 5 grand for the raid so it is quite a bit more expensive than external's. Have you thought of making a Raid in your Mac Pro try a 74 Gb raptor for your boot disk then 3 750gb seagate's, one for backup/storage then the other 2 as a raid 0 ! try it a lot cheaper alternative if you dont need 7 terabytes of ****in storage!

A RAID0 is a very bad idea in this case. Your line of argument shows that you haven't really understood what a RAID is for.
The point of an XRaid (or any real RAID system for that matter, such as a Wiebetech hardware RAID) is that you have a certain protection against hardware failure.

I'm sure you'll find this thread useful: people have posted their experience with different storage setups. As you can see, there is no `one size fits all'. The XRaid is expensive -- and perhaps even overkill for you, but it's neither overpriced nor is it meant to replace a (compared to an XRaid) puny setup like made up of one Raptor and 3 750 GB drives.

If you want us to help you pick the right storage solution, you need to tell us what you do, how much data you already have, how much data you want to access at a given time and how much data you add each month. In said thread, a fellow member adds 30-50 GB/month -- which needs to be taken into account when you plan to spend serious money on a storage setup.