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