Creative Cow Recommends RAID-5 System

Here's a review at Creative Cow that recommends a system for a RAID-5 setup from Dulce. The reviewers says that is has very good ease-of-use and is pretty darn fast.

I've written before about RAID-5 here. This Dulce system does RAID-3 too. I'm not even sure what that is. The low-down on RAID-5 is that your data is stored across an array of hard drives and if one dies, then you don't lose your data.

My latest thinking is that hard drives are so cheap, why not just backup up all your data to cheap USB hard drives. No, you can't keep working immediately if a hard drive dies, but at a quarter per GB, you can't really get much cheaper than that. Use Retrospect or your backup app of choice to backup up your media drive at night. USB isn't fast enough to edit with, but the transfer times are OK. With USB drives, it's pretty easy to expand storage, the capacity of the drives are high, and did I mention it's cheap. At least you have peace of mind if not 100% certainty that you won't miss a deadline if a hard drive dies.

Mac Pro Onboard SATA

Recently I wrote this post about a way to use the extra SATA ports that are otherwise unused inside the Mac Pro. Well, here's an article from a person who actually did it, and on reflecting on it, I would judge it not worth the effort. Appparently the NewerTech eSATA Cable Kit/PCI bracket manual recommends that you route the cables underneath the motherboard. I'm not up for that kind of surgery personally. Neither was the author, so he/she just left the cables floating around inside the computer. I guess that would be OK, but generally I don't like to do stuff inside of a $2,500 computer unless a manufacturer is recommending it. When you can get 2 eSATA ports from a number of PCIe card manufacturers for $100, I wouldn't bother with this personally. File this under, too much trouble but cool (in the geeky way).

Cool in a geeky way would also describe the site where I found this article xlr8yourmac.com.