RAID Storage

In photography, imaging or design, our data is one of our most precious assets.
The thought of losing a current job or hundreds of hours work or thousands of personal photos is enough to make anyone grab for a bucket!

RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. With RAID enabled on a storage system you can connect two or more drives in the system so that they act like one big fast drive or set them up so that one drive in the system is used to automatically and instantaneously duplicate (or mirror) your data for real-time backup. Now, the exact speed and reliability you'll achieve from RAID depends on the type of RAID you're using.

RAID systems come in many various sizes and types. The variable that change are :

Below we talk a little about RAID storage systems mainly in relation to desktop style models that connect directly to your Mac or PC.

RAID is NOT backup!

It's important to understand that RAID is a measure of protecting against hardware failure.... it is not a backup! RAID does not protect against the following failures/issues :

In saying that RAID can be a great way to protect against that all too regular hard drive failure (except RAID 0 - read more below).

Advantages of RAID

There are three reasons you might want a RAID system of drives.

Which RAID mode should I use?

1. RAID 0 - Speed

RAID 0 is taking any number of disks and striping data across all of them. This will greatly increase speeds, as you're reading and writing from multiple disks at a time. An individual file can then use the speed and capacity of all the drives of the array. The downside to RAID 0 though is that it is NOT redundant, the loss of any individual disk will cause complete data loss.

Pros :

Cons :

Good for/as :

2. RAID 1 - Data protection

RAID 1 is also known as "mirroring" and is generally used with a pair of hard drives. The point of RAID 1 is primarily for redundancy, as you can completely lose a drive, but still stay up and running off the additional drive. You can then rebuild the array to a new drive off of the other drive with little to no downtime. RAID 1 also gives you the additional benefit of increased read performance as data can be read off any of the drives in the array. The downsides are that you will have slightly higher write latency, since the data needs to be written to all the drives in the array, and you'll only have the available capacity of a single drive.

Pros :

Cons :

Good for :

3. RAID 5 - Data protection and speed

RAID 5 combines the concepts of RAID 0 and RAID 1.

RAID 5 requires the use of at least 3 drives and will take the idea of RAID 0, striping the data across multiple drives to increase performance, but also adds the aspect of redundancy by distributing parity information across the disks.

Pros :

Cons :

Good for :

Promise Pegasus R4 & R6 ThunderBolt™ connected RAID storage

The fastest desktop RAID storage

The Promise Pegasus R4 and R6 are the First 4-bay and 6-bay High Performance Hardware RAID Solutions designed to unleash the raw power of Thunderbolt™ technology. Thunderbolt technology is a new, high-speed, dual-protocol I/O technology designed for performance, simplicity, and flexibility. This high-speed I/O technology is capable of delivering a blistering two channels of 10Gb/s (1.25GB/s) per port of performance.

Features

Download PDF about Pegasus Thunderbolt RAID units (3.5MB)

Onnto RC-M4QJ DataTale™ SMART RAID System

The Onnto DataTale RC-M4QJ 3.5'' SATA HDD 4-Bay RAID System is the ideal choice for designers, architects, digital filmmakers, audio engineers and any user requiring safe data management from a space-saving external storage device.

This new SMART RAID System has an intelligent GUI, RAID Master which allows easy management of multiple RAID tasks. Multicolored LED indicators and an LCM display keep users informed of the progress of each operation.

User Friendly Installation

The DataTale combined with the SmartGuider enables flexible removal and insertion of HDDs easily. Add the HDD Soft Sleeve, an optional accessory, for further protection from any dust or dirt!

Multiple Interfaces

The DataTale RC-M4QJ comes with the foremost universal interfaces including: 1394a, 1394b, USB 2.0, and eSATA.

2TB+ Support Ready

The DataTale RC-M4QJ is built with the latest chipset that will support 2TB+ HDDs.

Excellent Heat Dissipation

The System features an outstanding mechanical design and a rugged elegance of aluminum. The high quality, silent running fans in the RAID Systems will blow hot air from the bottom to the top while passing through the internal HDDs, dramatically enhancing internal air flow and efficiently cooling the high RPM SATA HDDs.

Features

Stardom SR2 2-Bay RAID 1 System - mirrored

The STARDOM SOHORAID SR2 has been the digital content storage system of choice among creative content professionals because it's one of the market's most compact and rugged RAID 1 mirroring backup solutions for content creation. Fully back up your entire digital photo and audio projects automatically.

Stylish and rugged

One of the most important features of the SOHORAID SR2 is its sleek exterior design and tough built that'll never go out of style when placed next to your Mac®. With three millimeter thickness in aluminum surroundings, the SR2's body shields the enclosed drives durably and at the same time dissipates the heat created by the drives greater and faster for the drives to work comfortably.

The core of SR2: RAID1 mirroring technolog

The internally built RAID 1 controller in the SR2 controls all data entering the system by duplicating them into two sets and then storing them in real-time into the two drives enclosed so you'll always have two sets of the exact same data in the system to protect against possible drive failures.

Data rebuilding & verification for safety

Whenever a drive failure occurs, simply replace with a new one and the RAID 1 controller can automatically rebuild (duplicate) the same original data from the non-failed drive into the new drive and get the system back to its original RAID 1 operational state. Moreover, the additional verification function allows you to scan the new drive after rebuilding of data has completed to make sure that all data are intact and usable.

Removable tray design

If drive replacement becomes necessary, the SR2 is modular designed for effortless removal and install of drives. It's also protected by a locking mechanism to secure the drive into place

Features

AXUS FIT300 and FIT500 Desktop RAID storage

3 or 5 bay High Performance >200MB/s storage

FiT series, a new stylish, versatile, easy to use and more economical RAID storage device. The heart of FiT is adopted with hardware RAID technology which offers high performance, superior reliability and large capacity for your budget.

FiT Series are plug & play RAID systems. Setup RAID configurations can be simply made by the Rotary switch. The Rotary switch provides user direct and fast setting for RAID Level 0, 1, 3, 5 , PM, Large, and Clone. Users are not required to have any RAID knowledge but easily to enjoy the high-performance and reliability from the FiT RAID storage.

Encryption AES Key AES-256bit
FiT F series feature Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) Encryption Technology using a secret key of length (AES-256: 256-bit) for security RAID protections. AES encryption will be equipped with a AES key (left) by hardware encryption. Once the users generate the AES key, the RAID volume will be not accessed without AES key, offering users the most security way to keep important data guarded.

Features