I finally decided on a RAID box to hold music and photos in a disaster resistant appliance. A Galaxy 2 drive Network Attached Storage (NAS) with a pair of 750 gig WD GP drives has been ordered. This should give me about 700 gig that can remain “online”, assuming autopower off, all the time like the MacBook. It’ll be setup on a RAID 1, which mirrors the drive contents.
It’s none too soon. The MacBook complains daily of running out of space. I can’t hold my whole music library on the little 80 gig. There are numerous files that need to be shifted off. Things that I don’t want to download again, application installs, video, music that I don’t listen to, Audible audio books that I have finished, etc.
There is already one attached 100 gig for holding this, but it is only one drive. A drive that remains off most of the time, but that one-drive system is how I lost most of everything. The additional RAID box provides always access and a second more resilient backup device.
This is a stop gap. What I would really like is an upgradeable 3, 5, 7, or 10 drive system RAID 5 that scales much better. Such a system would run into a couple thousand dollars very easily. I’m hoping this will reverse itself and a reasonable solution will materialize.
Storage is cheap these days. Storage solutions are not. RAID 5 boxes like this start at $400 and go up pretty quickly. This initial price point is a bit galling. Single external drives are <$100, double JBOD drives are <$100, double drive RAID 1 boxes are >$200, and a 5 drive RAID 5 is >$700.