What is the best External Hard Drive to use for my MAC?

I need to know what is the best external drive to use? People here on LAFCPUG don't seem to like Maxtor or Lacie. Is a RAID type the best? Thanks for your opinions...

Yes. RAID 10s would be ideal, RAID 5s would give you more storage, at the expense of reliability and speed (it's still more reliable than a RAID 0). It also needs to have a good chipset and good overall construction and design, and you run a UPS on the thing.



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If a RAID fails and your media is split up among the drives what do you do then? It is faster than a solitary drive...
What is the best make/model and where do you buy them?

>If a RAID fails and your media is split up among the drives what do you do then?

It depends on what you mean by failure. Parity information is kept in a RAID 5, so if a drive fails, the RAID goes into a degenerated state. In a degenerated state, data is still accessible. In those cases you will swap out the failed drive, and set the RAID to rebuild. No down time, no data loss.

There are many different kinds of RAIDs out there, and Ben King, one of the mods here, wrote a pretty good article on RAIDs in the supermag:

[www.supermeet.com]



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Kubrick-Fan,

You also need to do a Forum Search entitled "RAID" and start reading up on the subject. It sounds like this is new terminology to you and this is way too important to what we do in the Post Production world to not do research.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.