[Leica] external raid drives options

[dbirkey at hcjb.org (Duane Birkey)]

Nathan the question comes down to how much do you want to store... and how 
cheaply do you want to do it...
 
I have one of the Western Digital My Book Raid 1 Drives.... I found one 
version with a 3 year warranty..  You can actually also set it up for 
striped raid 0 or no raid at all... Supposedly you can easily swap out and 
rebuild the drive... or even upgrade the drives to more capacity in the 
future.  I've seen Seagate and Maxtor units as well
 
Just remember that with raid 1 you get only get half of the  total 
advertised space... a 2 tb unit is made up of 2 - 1TB drives...   I use it 
with a firewire 800 cable.... ( you can also use other firewire cables and 
USB)  which makes it pretty fast. Some units allow the drive to be shared on 
a local network.
 
You can find raid 5 units with multiple drives with much more storage space 
as well...  You are more likely to find these at some place that deals with 
IT/network solutions.  These are going to be more expensive just because you 
have more drives in the unit....
 
It's just a matter of how much you want to spend and how much space you 
need.  And of course... how often you expect to upgrade your drives....  I 
don't think you should plan on drives lasting more than 3 years... and 
obviously you are not going to find a raid drive with the longevity of a M 
series camera.....   
 
Personally.... I only use the raid drives for fotos and data in process that 
I haven't backed up to archival gold cd's and dvds....     But everyone has 
a different workflow.  I got mine for around $300 from Staples.... 
 
Duane