I’m trying to find an external raid 1 solution for my home use to reliably save photos/movies/etc. I don’t care much about performance. I care a lot about reliability. If a drive or the whole unit fails, I want to have the option of pulling out the drives and being about to mount them in a Windows box for data recovery.
There are a lot of choices out there and it’s hard to find out how they handle when they go bad. The devices don’t always list what format their disks are in their specs. And I often find reviews where the user said the device crashed and they were unable to mount the drive.
The ideal device would:
- Write drives such that they can be removed from the unit and easily mounted in a Windows box
- Reliably write raid 1 data so that chances of corruption is low
- Rebuild the raid if one drive goes bad
- Good power management. The drives will likely be unused for long periods of time.
I would be interested in any recommendations you have for an external device. I only need a 1TB solution, so an empty device or a device with drives is fine.