I have tons of photos, videos, tax records, and other personal and professional information that I store electronically. My collection has grown to several hundred gigs and seems to be increasing exponentially in size every year. I needed a reasonably priced, high capacity storage solution with redundancy.

I would love to own a network attached (NAS) appliance from Iomega or other vendors that supports multiple RAID options but don’t have the budget for this type of solution.

I also considered using Amazon S3 but the reoccuring charges for storage and bandwidth usage fees are too high. Another option was to use my existing webhosting provider to store my files but I decided against this option for security reasons. Plus, I prefer to have access to my files instantly, even when I don’t have an Internet connection.

After some research, I purchased a Western Digital My Book Pro Edition II. At sub $400, this device fits my budget and to meets my requirements.

• High capacity (RAID 0 at 1 TB)
• Redundancy (RAID 1 at 500 GB)
• External drive (USB and Firewire)

I followed the Quick Install Guide and did below.

1. Install RAID Manager software
2. Connected drive to PC
3. Changed to RAID 1 (comes shipped with RAID 0 and HFS+ file system)
4. Ran Windows Disk Management Tool
5. Intialized Device
6. Partitioned and formatted drive (NTFS)

A full format took over an hour. I now have about 500 GB mirrored drive (RAID 1) ready to store all my files. I can easily fill entire 500 GB but plan to clean up a few things and try to get that number down to 200 GB.

Hopefully, my experience with this device will be positive and not suck.

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Filed under: Gadgets