Choosing an external RAID enclosure

[burnttoastnice]

I've had my WD 500GB external drive for a number of years now (since around 2013) and it's almost full. Over the years the drive has accumulated many memories, personal files, movie backups, installers, basically a bunch of things that it would be a real pain to lose. A few years back a Windows 8 preview build corrupted the drive, which I was able to partially repair on my ancient XP machine, and using Linux to finish recovering everything to my laptop's 750GB drive. I managed to get the recovered files back onto the hard drive and it's been working flawlessly since.

 

Lately I haven't been using the drive much, as the thought of a head crash causing data loss sounds like a risk I'd like to very much avoid. So now I'm looking for an external RAID 1 enclosure to allow me to have the data stored on 2 drives at a time, with the added convenience of portability. The enclosure needs to somehow let me know when a drive fails so I have enough time to get a new one. I found some below but could do with some advice from y'all.

 

Spoiler

1. Icy Box IB-RD3620SU3
   1. £64.99
   2. Rear fan
   3. Drive status indicator LEDs
   4. 

2. StarTech USB 3.0 eSATA

   1. £65.81

   2. Rear fan

   3. Drive status indicator LEDs

   4. Reputable brand, seen their products everywhere from personal use to professional environments

   5. 

3. Caldigit VR2

   1. £329.99

   2. Comes with hard drives (4TB)

   3. Drive status screen

   4. Intake fan

   5. No reviews(?)

   6. 

 

1. 1.  

 

Thanks in advance

 

 

[Captain_WD]

2 hours ago, burnttoastnice said:

~snip~

Hi there

 

I could also suggest checking out WD's solutions for dual-bay DAS drives.
WD My Book Duo: is a good option with RAID support, LED indication about the drives, comes with WD Red drives, provides good performance and data security and works great with all types of systems.
WD My Book Pro: is the upgraded version with better speeds, additional thunderbolt connection and different design.

 

Feel free to ask if there are any questions. 

 

Have in mind that RAID shouldn't be considered a replacement of backups and if you plan on holding that data only on such enclosure I would advise you to consider another copy on a separate drive for a true backup.

 

Captain_WD.

[Lehti]

Before you buy, make sure the hard drive has no bad sectors. In my (limited) experience with raid too many of them will prevent you from creating the array. 

[Captain_WD]

I completely agree with @Lehti! 

 

Testing the health of your drive before putting it in a RAID array can save you a lot of trouble down the road. If the drive has issues this will reflect on the performance and the condition of the whole array, creating errors, corruption and failure which can lead to permanent data loss.

 

I'd check the raw values of the S.M.A.R.T. status and would run a diagnostic tool from the manufacturer.

 

Post back with some results from the tests

 

Captain_WD.