I talked about RAID NAS options the other day, and I couldn't help myself, not leaving well enough alone I kept researching and thinking about my home data needs and different options and solutions. What was niggling me about the RAID NAS solution was this - if your RAID box has a failure then you are f*cked! Seriously, even though a RAID box has some level of protection against one of the drives failing, if the NAS box itself suffers a dire fate, you're hosed. And believe me when I say that I truly feel so sorry for those who have suffered a RAID failure and permanently lost important data.

I read an article talking about why RAID's aren't a good option for SOHO environments, and it confirmed the doubt that I was having about that solution. So instead of going with a RAID solution, I'm going a different route because if I lost my digital pictures, digital music, personal documents, and other digital treasures - I would be up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

With a RAID, I was planning to use it sort of like our work network storage - it would have been my main repository for stuff. Now I'm thinking a different strategy. Use my computers main internal harddrive as their main places for data, and then automate backups from these computers to a Network Drive. The main differences being 1) The primary copy of data resides on the computers hard drive not the RAID box, and 2) you have a complete and full duplicate copy of your data. With a RAID solution as a Network drive you only have 1 copy of your data.

Fortunately I found a great deal on a 1TB Gigabit Ethernet drive solution from LaCie for a very respectable $285 delivered from Buy.com Seriously, you can't buy two 500GB drives and a case with USB2 and Gigabit Ethernet for the price of this Big Ethernet drive from LaCie. By the way, because this drive has both a USB2 and a gigabit ethernet interface you have some options. You can connect this drive to your router and have an instant network drive. You can also connect it to your Apple Airport Extreme USB2 port and have an instant network drive that way. Or of course you can connect it directly to your computer via a USB2 connection. I'll be connecting mine directly to my gigabit ethernet switch on my LAN so that I get fast speeds to my wired computers.

If I decide that I really would rather use a network storage device as my primary repository for data on my LAN, then I can always buy a second LaCie Big Ethernet 1TB drive and clone my primary drive on the secondary drive.

I feel very good about this new solution, it offers me a high amount of data safety at a very reasonable cost.