Ok, I’m considering to buy a RAID 5 external drive. If you have no clue what I mean by that, stop reading. Anyway, one of the products that seems interesting is the Lacie S1S 2TB which is a nice setup that includes four hot swappable 500GB drives. Now here’s the catch (straight from the manual): > > Caution! Do NOT attempt to replace a hard disk yourself. Removing a hard disk from a Drive Bay will void the > warranty. > Eh, excuse me? The whole point of buying a raid 5 setup is being able to fix a disk failure by replacing it with a new one without powering down the unit (which according to another quote in the same manual is an extremely bad idea in the event of disk failure). So I guess no Lacie for me (hey that rimes!).
Actually I’m looking for a simple setup that:
- uses little power (It’s going to be inactive pretty much most of the time).
- makes no/little noise (it’s going to be in my living room)
- comes without drives (so I can install some myself)
- is easy to maintain, particularly in the eventuality of drive failure
- is easy to connect (USB 2 or gigabit ethernet).
- allows for at least four drives (more is better)
- supports raid 5 (I want my data to survive failure of 1 disk)
- is reliable as hell (I several drives currently and am terrified of the day they will fail)
Tips are welcome. Right now I am seriously interested in the Synology CS-406, which gets a really good review at Tom’s hardware. The price is reasonable and it seems to meet all the listed criteria above and it comes with a whole bunch of very cool additional features.