[paddington]

Originally Posted by saltman

For most people, RAID is more potential trouble than it is worth. Making backups is probably the best thing to do. Hard drives are so cheap nowadays that is the way I back stuff up now. on xtra drives.

I think Seagate and Western Digital are great drives. If I remember right Seagate has a 1 year warranty and WD a 3 year but I may have that reversed. Chances are you won't have to use either.

I agree. It is, now. A few years ago, RAID5 was still the best way to go, imo.. but with the advent of cheap, giant drives, a single storage drive with occassional backups are easier and better now. Also imo.

I use a Seagate 2TB drive for all my storage. I have a second one that I spin up once a month or so and use SecondCopy to match it up to the main one.
This way, I only have the OS drive (80GB or so) and the single 2TB Seagate running... much less heat and noise.. and just about as secure as RAID. If I do some massive organizing or something, I just fire up the other one and back it all up.. then spin it down for a few weeks.

easy, cheap, quiet, cool, etc...