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Burgeoning storage capacities are changing the face of consumer electronics. With MP3 players, users are regularly slipping 60GB into their back pockets. I have a 1GB CompactFlash card in my camera that I have a hard time filling in a single outing. And with a flood of high-def TV programming just around the corner waiting to jam your HD DVR, high-capacity storage devices seem destined to become as ubiquitous as TVs. It seems like only yesterday that we were agog at the idea of having tens of gigabytes in a hard drive. Now, a few hard drive vendors who believe that consumers are beyond gigabytes have unleashed terabyte hard drives onto the market. That's right, a terabyte. That's 1,000 gigabytes.
Never mind the question of whether we really need all that storage or whether we're just expanding into the void because we can (as people are wont to do, with both virtual and physical space). The point is, we can, and heck, maybe more of us will actually start backing up our growing mountains of data. The most common terabyte arrays available to consumers right now consist of four 250GB drives, packed together in a relatively compact box. The vendors are trying to distinguish their own products through extra features, such as print servers, extra USB and FireWire ports, and network capability. But the most compelling feature of these gargantuan drives is the ability to operate as RAID arrays.
In a RAID setup, two or more hard drives are combined for increased fault tolerance and/or performance. In the simplest RAID 0 array, the data is spread out over multiple drives; while this improves performance, because you have multiple drives reading or writing separate portions of the same file, it doesn't safeguard your data--lose one drive, lose all your data. With the popular RAID 5 arrangement, which requires a minimum of 3 disks, you get both improved performance and fault tolerance. If one of the disks in a RAID 5 array fails, you simply replace it with a functional disk, and the magic of RAID 5 restores all of your data. Even NAS drives with less than a terabyte of capacity, such as the Iomega NAS 200d (though it's darn close at 750GB), provides RAID support. Why should you care about this? Well, you did spend all that time working on those video edits or downloading the entire boxed set of Abba hits and B sides. Do you really want to lose it all when your hard drive fails? Remember, no hard drive lasts forever, so unless you have a backup in place, it's not a question of if you'll lose your data, but when.
Read the CNET editor's take
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7.0 out of 10
6.3 out of 10
