Hi Everyone,
Well, everyone being probably the 2 people that show me the kindness of reading this blog...anyway
I just installed a RAID system to my computer set-up. It's great. I'm using the LaCie 2Big which is a great machine. There was a little speed-bump in setting it up, because when you set it to one of its versions of RAID 1, you have to let it sit and rebuild itself which can take up to 12 hours. I was panicking because I was getting warning lights and I didn't think it should take any longer than the formatting process, since the unit contained no data. All was good, though, and a quick email to tech support fixed me right up!
Until recently, I didn't know what a RAID was, so let me provide a bit of background. RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Independant Disks. There are several versions of RAID, and mine is set to RAID 1 which means multiple copies of the data. My LaCie drive contains 2 500Gb harddrives inside which are set up to maintain 2 mirror images of whatever data I send to the drive. When (not "if" but "when") one of the hard disks fails, I just need to replace that disk and let the system rebuild itself with no loss of my data. Cool, eh! I realize this sounds a bit paranoid with regards to data backup and security, but when I'm charging people $####+ for photography of their special event and then putting tons of work into their processing, site building and other services, I really need to be sure that the time will not come where I have to contact the client and tell them I had a drive failure and their images are toasted. Being sued would only be the beginning of the havoc something like that would create! No-sir, not for me! Sure, I could pull a failed drive from my machine and send it away for recovery, but that's MEGA expensive and there are no guarantees! For a little over $400 tax included, I bought a large amount (500Gb) of peace of mind.
Plus, it looks cool! Here's a pic I got from LaCie's website to show you. I don't have a specific letter of permission to use the image, but I doubt LaCie will whine about the free advertisement. :)
