Portable / Home Backup Solution

March 22, 2005 1:32 PM

Backup / Storage: I have a picture of an ideal product in my head. It connects via USB or Firewire, it contains two IDE drives that mirror each others. They're hot swappable, so if one fails, you just by another standard IDE drive of the same size and throw it in. All this is transparent to the machine accessing the device. It's under $300. Does this exist?
posted by weston to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

short answer: yes

i can't give you a long answer because i don't know enough about RAID.

but i'm sure someone can.
posted by fishfucker at 1:35 PM on March 22, 2005

huh. not sure that the one i linked retailing for $199 is gonna mirror for you, but this one appears to, and is $300.

hopefully someone will step in with a suggestion for purchasing the best price/implementation.
posted by fishfucker at 1:39 PM on March 22, 2005

also, i didn't think to include the hd cost. sorry.
posted by fishfucker at 1:39 PM on March 22, 2005

Hmm here is a "similar" device that is cheaper; You could buy some cheap USB external hd's; This wouldn't satisfy the raid requirement; I think creative use of software such as unison might facilitate mirroring.
posted by AllesKlar at 2:14 PM on March 22, 2005

This is sort of what you're looking for, although as AllesKlar suggested, since RAID is usually implemented on a SCSI card, having RAID on a the USB device will significantly add to the cost of the device, and RAID is probably overkill for a home backup solution. For a good/cheap option, just get an IDE to USB case, and plop in a cheap hard drive.
posted by patrickje at 2:47 PM on March 22, 2005

You could stick this in a USB or Firewire case.

I've been very happy with the Arco stuff we have at work.

You should be able to bolt this together for about $300, plus the cost of drives.
posted by Marky at 3:26 PM on March 22, 2005