chuckleb

James, Just checked the Google store, there is a Wuala app to get to your data and is also cross platform. I have a lot of my documents store in dropbox behind Truecrypt, that works somewhat and is platform agnostic.

This is a rather interesting topic, and I'm not sure if any hardware vendor does this. Can you point to some of the articles that you mention? I'd love to find out more. Your concept of setting a random speed on boot is similar to how cron's RANDOM_DELAY variable works. In this case, when cron starts for the first time, it will set a random delay and base all tasks offset from that. This occurs at ever time it starts up and persists until it's stopped. You could easily imagine something similar for HDDs where they could pick a random offset on boot. This would be much better than hard-coded offsets.

I am not sure, you will have to contact the company directly. I don't have anything that required a high level of protection, it was nice to have. I try to never store private information.

One option that I found was a cloud service provider Wuala. We use it for some church documents and everything stays encrypted until unlocked. We are looking for free or low cost options since they are changing their pricing model. Good service though. Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

Yep, you generally can't over-spec a hard drive so it will work fine.

I have to add that the US-made products would then have NSA-approved backdoors!

One option is a Lenovo M1015 card from eBay which runs somewhere between $85-100 depending on the seller. You'll also need a SAS to SATA breakout cable for about $15. This card will run a hardware RAID-1 or RAID-10 just fine and is easy to configure. It's basically a rebranded LSI 9211 card.

@jamesbradley I looked at all five of the ones listed and they are all basically the same. I have bought the Seagate for customers, used the WD for myself, and the others seem fine as well. These enclosures don't have active cooling so the drives are slower than regular desktop drives (usually under 5900 RPM). I would say they are equal, as others have said, so see what you can afford. I would expect them to last 2-3 years of always on.

I agree that nothing lasts, this is why I archive to stone tablets. Of course nothing lasts but that's the point of warranties. They are there to replace the device, it doesn't guarantee the data. If you want to protect data you need multiple copies, preferably offsite, and hopefully with checksums so you can verify. This is why I have multiples of important data and single copy for anything else. To protect it requires cost and effort. So what do you do for "important" data then?

How is WD differentiating their products now with their WD FYYS Re drives vs the Red Pro? Both are 4TB drives with anti-vibration, etc.. actually, that and the Se cloud drives? It seems that we have three models that are basically the same.

I can see a few solutions that I'd recommend. I wasn't sure if your $250 budget number includes disks or not, but if it does, that makes it hard. I also don't know how you are currently serving them - from a server or just your desktop. 1) Manual + cheapest. Buy a set of HDDs and set a calendar reminder every week to copy all your contents over. Swap one to the bank and one offsite. If windows, you can use robocopy or something similar, if Linux, rsync 2) Manual + cheapest + automated. Plug in a drive and use Crashplan to automate the backups. I don't recommend swapping the crashplan store though since you may end up missing content. Leave it plugged in. Crashplan is free to backup to a local media. 3) All NAS setups will cost you more than $250 unless you have all the parts left over from a previous computer. Well, there may be exceptions, there was a deal at Microcenter for a MB+CPU for $100, then you'd need RAM and disk still. For disks, since these are backups, you could get by with desktop-grade disks. You can get 3TB drives for about $100 bare and an external disk reader for $30 or so. If you wanted to, you could do 4TB white label drives for about $145 as well. The problem is easier when you're taking about what will fit on one disk. If you have more than 1 disk work of content, then you have to figure out how to break it up or span multiple disks together to get the capacity you need. That's when you really need NAS solutions or something else. Also NAS would give you automated backups so you don't forget vs going the cheap route and setting a calendar event.

Nice, it can also do write cache if you can shove in a second drive. CC will drop back to read-cache only if one of the two drives in the mirror fails. Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

Unexpected sense errors happen for many reasons, not necessarily card. It can be due to a drive dropping, bad enclosure, bad cabling, or anything. I an working on diagnosing some right now that I think is related to enclosure issues. If you are using a breakout cable, try swapping ports. Likewise with an enclosure. If the problems stay on the same port, could be cable. If they move, probably drive. It can definitely be an overheat though. I wouldn't say it is necessarily the card though. Drives are pretty high. Are you using Linux? I have been some testing techniques there if you'd like to try. Not near my PC or I'd write more.

The purpose of cache vault is to replace the battery model with something that can last longer due to the flash memory and capacitor. It is not accessible to the card or the volumes on the card for use as a cache. The capacitor allows the card to keep the data that was sitting in the card cache ram viable in a crash and can write it out to disks when power is restored. I think that any amount of cachecade wild be nice even if it were mlc. It helps buffer more read/write at faster seeks. Just checking, did you get all the pieces? I think the cachevault is on the card but the caps are on a second card and cable. I think that is how my 9271 is.

@nibble123: Can you give more details on what you have? How much data, does NAS work for you or something local, etc? There are lots of options depending on how much data you need and what tools. I have a main file server with about 16TB online. I use rsync to rsync important data to an external 4TB that I swap to the bank every couple of months. I also have Crashplan dumping to a locally attached HDD as well as the cloud (optional). It helps to have more details to think of ideas. Lots of ways to prioritize data as well. Many of my media content I would be annoyed to lose, but not worth it to make multiple copies.