My wife needs a relatively cheap (under $1000) storage solution for her office. Almost every computer is an Apple and there are already external drives on each computer for individual time machine backups.

However, for large (especially completed projects) I was thinking of getting this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816132015

Add two hard drives, mirror on RAID 1, connect it to her iMac via a eSATA/USB connector and then share it to the other computers over the network.

Any suggestions or criticisms?

Another idea is this: http://store.apple.com/us/product/H7...0Nw#tech-specs

That's much faster but not upgradable. Speed isn't essential, reliability is.

 

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc...G/Product.html

 

Thanks, i was looking at that one too. I wonder if that can be done in RAID 1, with two sets of two mirroring?

 

Isn't that a RAID 10 aka RAID 1+0? It say it does it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nested_...s#RAID_1_.2B_0

 

Why not a NAS?

 

I was browsing the Apple site for thunderbolt external drives and the invaluable InvisibleHand addon found it for $150 less than Apple was selling it for.

One of the greatest add-ons out there

http://www.getinvisiblehand.com/

 

you can get a WD My Book Live 3TB NAS for under $200 shipped on ebay...

 

he needs redundancy....

 

it has redundancy, 1.5 TB of redundancy...read up on it.

 

Its the cloud man...the cloud.

 

F the cloud.

 

Bingo, I found a good one that offers FTP access and happens to be cheaper than the thunderbolt setups.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822108065

Remote access would most likely be useful. My wife occasionally wants to work on something from home.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions.

 

Thanks, I'm looking for something like this too...

Although I was thinking of a Drobo

 

I have never been a fan of raid 1.
It does have speed going for it but it only helps if the drive dies quickly. but if the primary drive gets corrupted, the corruption passes to the second disk.


Raid 5 or 6 gives you better protection but with more overhead so you take a performance hit, but if this is for backup, then that is the way to go.

 

Pretty good deal on a Netgear NAS (today only):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...Tpk=22-122-062