Is it better to buy a 4TB RAID 1 hard drive, or 2 hard drives with 2TB each, and just use SyncToy (or invest more and buy a RAID 5 drive)?
Solution 1
Depends on what you want. If it is important for you that there is no downtime when one of your disks fails (and a disk fail has a much higher probability than an electronics/controller fail), use a RAID.
If it is more important that your data is safe (i. e. a backup), use separate disks and sync them manually (maybe even keep multiple generations as you can always accidentally delete important files).
A RAID is not a backup (in the rare case that the electronics fail). You will need a backup (at least if you think your data is somewhat important), but you will only need a RAID if uptime is important to you.
Solution 2
I had the same dilemma a while ago (with 1TB drives), I chose to use Raid 1 for protection but I sort of regret it.
I wanted 4 drives and the price of 4 bay enclosures was expensive and I wasn't very impressed with any of the sub £200 2 bay ones, so I bought a Celeron based system and loaded Freenas on to it - which I am very impressed with.
If I had the choice again, or had the time to copy files off and change, I would personally use them as two separate drives and Rsync between the drives as it gives more flexibility for the future (e.g. upgrading becomes slightly easier).
If you have the money, the best thing (in my personal opinion) is Raid 5 + hot spare on a hot swappable array - but out of your options, I would go for two separate copies and sync them - this also gives you a minimum backup against accidental deletion and changes etc.
I have said a bit more than your question asked, hope it gives you some interesting information as I was in the same situation as you a while ago.
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GeekAbhiGeek
I started with Apple Basic and 6502 machine code and Assembly, then went onto Fortran, Pascal, C, Lisp (Scheme), microcode, Perl, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, PHP, and Objective-C. Originally, I was going to go with an Atari... but it was a big expense for my family... and after months of me nagging, my dad agreed to buy an Apple ][. At that time, the Pineapple was also available. The few months in childhood seem to last forever. A few months nowadays seem to pass like days. Those days, a computer had 16kb or 48kb of RAM. Today, the computer has 16GB. So it is in fact a million times. If you know what D5 AA 96 means, we belong to the same era.
Updated on September 17, 2022Comments
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GeekAbhiGeek over 1 year
Somebody said that with a RAID 1 drive, 4TB will be 2TB of storage, but if the controller goes bad, then the whole drive will go bad -- unless WD can send you a new enclosure? (stated in http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Book-Studio-WDH2Q40000N/dp/B002BH3ZCU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1277567998&sr=1-1 )
Cost $399
So is it just better to buy 2 drives -- each one 2TB, and use SyncToy to sync them up by using mirroring? There will be two power adapters then...
Total cost: $260 plus more electricity probably
It also sounded good to buy RAID 5, which I heard, with 4 of 2TB drives, you get 6TB of capacity, not 4TB. But the WD RAID 5 drive on Amazon.com also has bad reviews
Cost: $294
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GeekAbhiGeek almost 14 yearsa RAID is not a back up... even RAID 1? or 3 or 4 hard drives all mirroring itself? how come? what about 2 independent drive sync'ed by SyncToy or RSync?