Idea: USB-RAID Hub
For around a year now, I’ve been using a external USB hard drive to store backups of my two year old’s DVDs. Streaming the video from a hard drive is the only way to ensure the integrity of the movie as my two year old has a tendency to quickly render the physical DVD unreadable. Anyhow one of my biggest concerns with using external drives is the fact that there is no redundancy to the data. Sure I could manually backup my entire video collection to another external hard drive, but that seems way to inefficient to be the best possible solution.
That got me thinking that it would be great to have a device, similar to your standard USB Hub, that had RAID capability built in. Connect one end to your computer, and connect two (or more) drives to the available ports on the other side, configure the device to your desired flavor of RAID (1, 5, whatever), and start filling it up with your data, knowing the whole time that should one of the drives fail, your data will be safe.
Sure, a USB-RAID mechanism might not be the speediest thing out there (due to the USB bottleneck), but if you’re using it to store media (video, music, photos) that don’t change very often, speed might not be such an issue as most of the time you’ll be reading the data rather than writing it.
June 13th, 2007 at 6:52 am
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817332006
This looks like what you’re talking about. I use a similar setup, except I have a NAS(network attached storage) device that also utilizes raid and connects to my network so I can access the data from anywhere on my LAN or even over the internet.
June 13th, 2007 at 8:12 am
Mike - that’s pretty cool, and I especially like the price tag. I guess what I was thinking of was a device that contains everything this AMS Venus has minus the enclosure, so that you cobble together a number of external hdds into a raid configuration.
I’ve been a big fan of the Infrant (Now Netgear) ReadyNAS, and personally use one for my main storage. The problem with the ReadyNAS and NASes in general is that they’re expensive (The ReadyNAS is around $620 just to get a barebones system). Something like a USB-RAID hub or the AMS Venus would be a much cheaper way to get the data protection RAID affords.
Thanks for the tip on the AMS Venus - I’ll have to consider this if I need some quick, cheap RAID-enabled storage.