The NEW Safer Archive Drive

I take a ton of pictures. I have a nice RAID1 array inside my main editing PC and archive old images to DVD as well as external drives. Recently (see previous post) had a close call where one of my DVD backups failed and when I went to my archive external disk, it failed as well. It was a RAID0 array and even if I pulled the drives from the failed enclosure, I would have no hope of restoring the data since it was striped across two drives.


Anyway, I solved that problem with a new power supply... thank goodness. So time to pay more attention and pay more for a more reliable external storage solution. I ultimately want to get a good RAID5 or even RAID10 solution but they are expensive. For now, I would settle for a mirrored solution.


I decided to go with the newly released, Western Digital MyBook Studio Edition II 2TB Quad Interface. It comes with a dual drive (1TB each) setup in RAID0 formatted for HFS+ (Mac OS-X) but I would be using it in Windows Vista Ultimate x64 and in RAID1.

The things that made up my decision were the eSATA interface, the excellent design, the ease of service if a drive fails and the capacity and RAID1. Price is a little high but B&H has them for $464.00.


http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=410


Here are some benchmarks using FireWire 400 and eSATA connections. My PC isa custom built Asus Striker Extremewith Intel QX6700 and 4GB RAM. The eSATA is a Silicon Image chipset built into the MoBo.

FW400





eSATA

My External Drive Woes

Amongst many external drives in my collection, I have a LaCie Big Disk Extreme 500gb Triple Interface which all of a sudden decided to die on me.
The front blue light began to flicker dimly and I thought initially that it was simply Disk Activity/Access.. but it was not. I would hear the attempt to start the drives inside but it would end in 1/2 of a second.
Googled and Googled and everything pointed to bad and poor service, workmanship, issues left and right. Great, I was hosed :-(
But some of the articles pointed to some options, namely that my power supply could be bad. The model number for the power supply that came with my unit was 706479 or ACML-51

I went out to B&H Photo and purchased a spare Power Supply. I bought an updated model 710199 which is clearly labeled as non usable by LaCie on my model drive. But I decided to go ahead anyway... I was desperate. The original supply puts out 26W and the new one 34

I was very glad to see my drive power up again and show up as a drive on my system. I quickly moved off all my critical images off this drive.
Little did I know this was a dual drive, RAID0 array with two Western Digital 250GB drives inside. If there is a failure of either drive, all your data is hosed. This setup is good for high speed FW800 video editing or scratch space for NON-CRITICAL stuff... NOT for a backup device. I plan to dismantle the unit and use the drives in a new RAID1 enclosure for archiving.