I'm looking to buy a RAID HDD enclosure for when I get back to Cali this summer. I bought this thinking it was RAID when in fact it's not. They do make a RAID version but unsure and am looking for guidance.

I was looking at a few others such as the Drobo 5D but the reviews on Amazon are all over the place and the only consistency I see out of it was that either customer service sucks or the device is defective.

My intent is to store mostly family pics, family videos, our entire movie library, and some other misc. items while still having enough HDD space available for backups. I currently have four 4TB HDD ready to go but can purchase more if need be. I need to have at LEAST 12TB for everything.

Thoughts please.
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Jay - do you want maximum storage or maximum redundancy? The more redundancy the less actual storage you have. For example:

Raid 0 is no redundancy, so you get all 4TB for storage but the pooch is screwed if something happens to the disks.

Raid 1 is disk mirroring, so you would halve your storage for the price of having an exact duplicate of the drives.

Raid 2 uses but striping, which is pretty good for maximizing your use of the drives, but can be very slow to recover and less robust that '3'

Raid 3 uses striping at the byte level plus additional check data. If you can afford the use of space, I would recommend going with this one.

Raid 4 really isn't used.

Raid 5 is the most robust and easiest to recover from in the event of a disk failure.

All these techniques work fine with 4 disks, but you really only get 1 disk worth of storage space except with Raid 1 where you get half the storage of the total array.

If this seems too techie, you may find more useful information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels

The type of raid you want affects the systems that are applicable.

I have a friend who runs a small ISP who I can ask raid questions to, so I'll ping him for his recommendations.
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Thanks for the reply and the assistance Mark. I should have mentioned above what RAID I was looking for exactly.

I was originally looking for RAID 5 but can settle for no less than RAID 3.
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I've got a 1st gen Drobo and love it. Use it to back up 2 computers. Very simple and it tells you what to do.
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In the past I have used Thecus (www.thecus.com) NAS devices with RAID 5. For SOHO systems they are decently priced and their systems easy to use and work well. They may be spendy for personal use, but RAID 5 does not come cheap. The N4520 has 4 drive bays and costs about $390 plus the drives.
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Here is the reply from my friend who runs an ISP

"I've heard good things about Synology and that's probably the direction I'd go if I were getting another off the shelf array: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822108123."
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Thanks for that link. I like that system. This is cheaper than building your own.
I use RAID arrays, usually software RAID, as video archive storage.
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Thanks Michael and Mark. I'll look into these ASAP.
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