So you’ve got a hard drive and it died. Was it a La Cie? Then of course it died! Well, now you’ve got the FEAR that your other drives will die, too. And, well… I hate to tell you this but they will. All drives die eventually. The ones to fail faster than other brands are Western Digital drives (in my experience) That’s why they come with a 1 year warranty and are such a good deal at Best Buy. But they are cheap you say. You pay for what you get.
So what should I buy? Invest in a Drobo. It’s a hard drive housing that stores up to 4 hard drives and combines all the drives together into 1 large volume. Should one of the drives fail the others take over until you can put a new drive in. It can even survive if two drives fail. The best thing about this is you should never lose data. However, what you won’t read is that a Drobo’s data can become corrupted so it’s best to maintenance the drive with diskwarrior now and then.
If you put four 1TB hard drives in the Drobo will format them to 2.7TBs. A lot of the extra space is reserved for data recovery in case one of the drives dies. What’s nice to know is that when larger drives come out you will be able to put a new drive into your drobo. So when 2TB drives are sold you can swap out a 1TB for the new one. Nifty. This means you won’t have to keep shuttling your data around. It GROWS with you.
They cost $499 and are pretty freaking awesome. Check out the drobolator to see how it’s configured.
