Storage is cheap, and just keeps getting cheaper. I remember buying my first 250 megabyte hard drive, and paying just under a dollar per meg. Now we’re approaching multi-terabyte drives at retail stores for extremely reasonable prices. The age old problem, though, is how to protect all that precious data. RAID solutions have been around for a long time, but the consumer-grade products haven’t been all that great, and the commercial-grade products have been way too expensive. Things are starting to change, though, and the iStoragePro iT4UFER is a good indicator of what’s to come.
The iStoragePro iT4UFER is a pretty simple product. It’s an external cabinet for up to 4 hard drives, not included. The iT4UFER creates a single RAID 5 volume using the four disks. This means that a single drive can fail without any data loss. That’s a pretty good starting point for entry-level data protection.
The review unit I received came with four 1 terabyte disks. In a RAID 5 configuration, that provides 3 terabytes of usable space. When you power on the unit, you’re asked if you’d like to initialize the RAID. This will erase everything on the disks and create a new, blank volume that you can partition and format from your PC. Obviously if this is the first time you’re getting started, you’ll want to answer the prompt in the affirmative. If you’d already done this step and had loaded some data onto the volume, then you’ll obviously want to say “no” (or just wait: the question times out, and the device becomes usable after a few seconds).
Initializing a RAID volume is fast. It takes less than a minute, and then your volume is ready to be partitioned. Connect the iT4UFER to a computer, and set up the disk however you see fit. The iT4UFER supports USB, Firewire 400 and 800, and e-SATA. I tried all of the first three, and each was as easy to use as you’d expect from any other USB or Firewire device. Throughput depends on which connection you’re using, with Firewire 800 being the fastest of those I tried.
To your computer, the iT4UFER looks like a single physical hard drive. You can create one or more partitions and format them with the filesystem(s) of your choice. I created a single 3TB Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partition and connected it to both a MacBook Pro (OSX 10.6) and a Mac Mini (OSX 10.5). I copied some m4v movies I’d ripped from my paltry DVD collection over to the iT4UFER using USB, Firewire 400 and Firewire 800. Nothing really exciting to report here: the files transferred across just fine.
To test the fault tolerance features of the RAID volume, I did what anyone would do: start watching one of those ripped movies, and yank a hard drive out of the unit during playback. Again, there’s little to report here: playback continued uninterrupted. I placed the drive back in its slot, and the iT4UFER asked me whether this was a new disk. I lied and said that it was, and the unit happily set about repairing the RAID volume using the new disk. The whole time I was able to enjoy Sean Astin and the whole crew of the Goonies tearing it up in Astoria without a single hiccup.
Bottom Line
If you have data that’s important to you, you should be taking steps to protect that data. Devices like the iStoragePro iT4UFER are a good, entry-level investment in RAID technology: it protects your precious data from all-too-common hard drive failure. And the fact that it’s a portable, external unit means you can easily take your data with you if you shuffle between locations.
CONTEST
Along with the demo unit, I received a $100 gift card to Starbucks. I’m not sure if that was a blatant attempt at a bribe or not, but I’m above such things. I’m making that gift card available to you, dear readers, so that you can maintain the proper blood caffeine levels.
All you need to do to win this $100 Starbucks gift card is to write a short essay, here in the comments, explaining importance of data protection! Whether you choose to focus on RAID, or tape backup, or something else, be informative. Share your personal experiences. There’s no length requirement, so be as verbose or as brief as you feel is necessary. The only rule I’m imposing is no profanity. This is a family-friendly web site!
We’ll pick a random winner tomorrow at noon, Eastern.
UPDATE: Congrats to commenter Matthew B for being selected by our super sophisticated random number generator! The $100 Starbucks gift card is his. Coffee’s on, Matthew!
Do we write the short essay in the comments or send an email?
Sorry for the confusion. Please leave it as a comment here, for the edification of the entire Internet! I’ve updated the post to reflect this. Thanks.
Mr. Mackey says data loss is bad mmkay if you don’t make backups you are bad mmkay.
The end.
8 years ago I decided to go with digital pics for my son’s birth. not knowing much about pc’s at the time, the pc crashed and i had my father investigate. ‘my father investigate’ = let’s rebuild and start back from scratch. lost all my son’s baby pics and don’t know how to explain why his older sister and two younger siblings have a ton of baby pics (now on iMac with Time Machine enabled hooked up to a Western Digital External HD Mirror Edition – RAID 1) and he doesn’t.
lessons are:
a. your dad more than likely doesn’t know more than you when it comes to technology
b. my son will eventually get married and will ask for baby pics for those horrific wedding slide shows (you know, the one where the couples baby pics are displayed and the their relationship is horrendously documented) and i still don’t have a damn story / excuse as to what happened which will probably cause psychological issues and money for a shrink which will then lead to his divorce and the killing of innocent bystanders…
make sure you back up your ‘ish – this works with both data and the stuff that come out of your mouth!
P.S. western digital support SUX (long story) – but i’m looking for a more reliable way to back up my data with excellent customer support and quality products
The importance of data protection, by Laura Rees
There once was a writer. As writers often do, she was working on a tight deadline. In fact, the deadline was the end of the very business day our story takes place.
Well, this writer had already spent a good 8 hours working on this assignment. She sat down at her laptop the morning of said deadline, cup of coffee in hand. Can you guess where this story is headed?
Yes, after a failed attempt at taking a sip of coffee, she found that her keyboard was covered with the stuff, quickly seeping in between the keys. Moments later, her laptop began making alarming beeping noises, and an endless stream of lllllllllllllllllllls began appearing in her document. A few minutes after that – black screen.
Now, did this writer understand the importance of data protection? No she did not. The assignment she was working on was stored on the now defunct laptop, as were all her other important documents. (The assignment in question was for Emerson Network Power, self proclaimed global leader in business critical continuity – see the irony here?).
This writer had to meekly call her client and explain why she was unable to meet her deadline. Then she had to go to the public library to use a computer there and start the assignment again from scratch.
Do you think this this writer understands the importance of data protection now? You bet she does. She understands it like nobody’s business.
As you may have guessed, this writer was me. Save yourself the heartache I went through and always back up your stuff!
Contest Entry:
Data protection is an important part of our daily lives in this age of technology. With each new day new tech comes along making our lives more and more digital(give it time, we’ll all be robots soon enough).
It’s become common form for a company to keep very important files, for instance, on their computer’s harddrives, or, as of late, some manner of portable media(i.e. usb flash drives). Everyday common folk have begun to use computers more and more, with there being at least one in most households.
The most prominent form of data in my line of work is photographs. Now, with the invent of digital cameras and portable digital media, families are still printing pictures, but they are taking more and more than ever. To some, photos are the most important thing on their computers, often times photos being the only reason they even HAVE a computer.
Imagine, if you will, a computer. This computer has 10s of thousands of photos. Memories of times past. By some aweful bad luck, this computers harddrive is erased, the reason for it unimportant. The computer can be saved, perhaps, the games reinstalled for the kids, and dad’s Adobe Suite thrown back on.
But the photos. The data. It’s all gone. The family never thought to themselves “this could happen to us”, and so never saw any need for an external harddrive, or something of the like.
This happens near every day, and I hear about it. Distressed mothers come into my place of business all the time, teary-eyed at the loss of their child’s baby photos, the trip to Disneyland, and of her(now deceased) mother. It’s all gone, and it really hurts.
Data backup and protection is, simply put, a way of making sure that you can keep the things you can’t get back when they’re gone.
Sadly, though, it is the case mentioned above that is most cases. Many families and businesses need to go through a loss or two beore they wisen up and backup their info. It takes a hacking or three before the boss buys the info protection, or the antivirus.
The bottom line being, backing up and protecting can save you time, money, and grief. Downsides? I see none.
Have you ever lost the last 5 years of family pictures and videos? It’s a horrible feeling and you’ll only do it once. You need to make sure to have both on-site back-up and off-site though incase of fire. Don’t rely purely on RAID 5.
One of the most important things we can do is have our data backed up. I have been a BIG believer in this since I dropped a box of punch cards that were not sequence coded.
One major item to consider with an external storage device like this one – how do you use it? Do you use it for primary storage or as a backup device? If it is as a backup device, it is a great first line. If it is primary storage, you still need backup.
Backing up data is the first step in a data recovery plan. Having a recent copy of the data can solve a multitude of problems when a hard drive crashes (or the pc just dies.) A periodic backup to external media works wonders. I once spent hours backing up a pc to CD’s only to later find that a small piece of a sticky CD label had caught in the drive and made the backup worthless AFTER the hard drive was wiped (3 of the 15 disks had been tested.) This happened just after 200 LP’s had been converted to MP3 files. Needless to say, an external drive became a necessity and scheduled backups became the norm. I have yet to have a failure of a backup drive – although I know that will happen. In the meantime, a rotation of external hard drives is in use.
One great attribute of a RAID 5, is its ability to withstand the failure of a drive and keep humming along. Over the years, these arrays have been recommended and installed at my client sites as standard storage in servers (with additional tape backup.) Standalone RAID 5 devices that attach to a network (either in home or an office) have provided a level of backup security for several years. Of course, getting an archived copy of the data offsite is another issue. For your most valuable data, consider an offsite location. Of course, with the price of on-line backup, that is a great option for your most critical data. (This is a backup of a backup.)
In any backup scheme, checking the backup periodically is important. In my case with the CD’s, random checks indicated no problem – a full read of the disks would have revealed an issue. Likewise, I know of a business that kept a tape backup of their RAID 5 server only to find that someone had failed to read the tape write error messages for the last year before the RAID failed. (RAID controller failed and took 3 of the 5 disks with it – could not be rebuilt.) Checking the backup is important.
As a tech, I routinely remind my clients of the importance of backups. I have helped many of them design and implement backup plans, and I have helped one of them recover data and rebuild after a major failure to her business laptop.
I always took my own advice: data on my laptop backed up to an external drive, plus a weekly updated image of my laptop’s hard drive on a separate drive plus “cloud” storage via two separate apps. So I wasn’t too concerned when my laptop’s hard drive failed.
Until I realized that I had wiped my hard drive image off the one backup drive to help a client with a data recovery. No worries though: I have all my files backed up to a separate drive. I ran a data recovery software on my laptop’s hard drive and waited.
Two weeks later (and still running that data recovery software on my laptop), and my other backup drive failed. I nearly cried.
After five weeks of running the data recovery software on my failed laptop hard drive, it hung up. Recovery failed. I just about cried. Again.
So I replaced the hard drive and proceeded to rebuild all of my data from an even older backup that I hadn’t removed from an old backup drive. I was lucky to have even that, but I still lost quite a bit — invoices, receipts, etc. And those free “cloud” backups? Some of the data that supposedly was being backed up wasn’t. Other data was old.
The moral of the story? No matter how confident you are of your backup plan, test it often. And sometimes, the data gods are just going to hand you your arse on a platter.
“I remember buying my first 250 megabyte hard drive, and paying just under a dollar per meg.”
I had to laugh out loud when I read this. I clearly remember when we bought our Mac II we opted not get one of the 20 or 30 meg Apple hard drives and instead got a “big” third party hard drive. We paid $700 for a Jasmine 45 megabyte drive and were happy to have so much space!
Data protection and redundancy is very important for being redundant with your data in order to protect it. That way, your data is redundant and protected and stuff.
I know first hand the importance of good computer protection. A while back someone hacked into our family pc and created a fake Myspace page in my husbands name. After completing the process with Myspace we were able to get it removed, but this still took about a month! we didn’t know the email or password, and there were pictures from summer outings, parties and pics of our kids out there! It had to be someone we know because they knew WAY too much info about him! I am now cautious online and dont post as many things everywhere. People dont realize how vulnerable we are!-
Data storage and retrieval is key to completeing PhD. How do I know? Been there. Done that. I store my data in multiple media in different locations. A good RAID hdd unit is key to quick access and safety but I also keep copies of raw data and important stuff in DVDs and then an extra copy at home. You can never be too safe.
I have a slightly older blog post / experience about a near epic fail and backups. does it count? :-)
http://i.last.ro/2008/11/good-practices-protectmanage-your-linux.html
10x
About 3 years ago after moving into a new office in Boston, my business partner and I decided we HAD to begin properly backing up our data. We had experienced a catastrophic data loss in the past and thought we needed some type of back up for our small business. We purchased a external HD backup and hired someone to properly configure it (after attempting and failing to do it ourselves).
Soon after, our office (in a secure building!) was broken into and our computers stolen. Luckily, the thief (who was caught on camera – but what did it matter) had not spotted our external HD – which was right on the desk.
We managed to recover most of our data, but learned a few hard lessons:
1. Make sure you have business renters insurance. We assumed ours covered our computers, and it didn’t.
2. It worked out alright in our case, but a smarter idea for backup would be an offsite backup in addition to an external HD backup.
3. Get a heavy ass door that can’t be jimmied open with a butter knife.
We took our door with us when we moved because the office building refused to pay for it. :D
I’ve always been good about backing up my photos and videos as my family lost old hard copy photos to fire damage when I was a kid and it really stuck with me. Unfortunately my focus was exclusively on my photos and videos and when the hard drive on my Macbook crashed about a year ago I had never done a full back-up. This actually would have been fine for me, but my wife had transferred her entire address book to the Macbook and no longer had a physical copy. As I was always one to lecture on the importance of backing up your data my wife will likely never let this one go and still brings it up to me. For the sake of your data and your marriage back everything up.
For me backing up data has always been about making multiple copies in multiple places. There are some good tools that help automate the process but concern for my data motivates me to make the backups necessary. Thomas Jefferson said “…let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.” Having many targets for backups and keeping them in sync and manageable is the way I make backups of important data.
About 3 years ago my older sister got married and decided that she wanted the wedding video to be done by her close friend. The video was fantastic and she kept it stored on her old xp based dell laptop that she of course didnt back up. One fall from her kitchen countertop and her friend not saving a copy later and she is now without a video of the best day of her life forever.
Data protection is important because when you leave your hard drives on the floor behind your desk, sooner or later (sooner) your dog will knock them over during a transfer, rendering 1tb and years of netflix rips useless.
Computers have been around for a little bit over 60 years, the first ones were big enough that you could walk right into them. That was a problem, for two reasons; debugging was a literal term, and that they were huge and could do only small mathematical calculations. Time continued, and we got DOS computers from a man named Bill Gates, and his company: Microsoft. At around the same time, two men in a garage were building a company called apple by assembling computers, and selling them to a local computer store. After a short year or two, they released the Apple I, the first computer with a GUI. Back then, storage was small, and these computers could not hold images the size of photographs (digital photography hadn’t been invented yet either). With such small storage, protection for this data was not necessary, therefore the problem was not yet discovered.
As time went on, we began to see disk capacities of up to five gigabytes, and we began to see small photos on the internet. These were incredibly slow downloads, but were possible. The problem still was not huge however, simply because photos had to be scanned onto a computer, so people still had printed copies. Printed copies are not fool proof, however they were more reliable than digital copies, and much easier to obtain.
We fast forward a few years to when digital cameras began to come out, and Ipods began to show up everywhere. Digital cameras had terrible batteries, very expensive storage, and were extremely expensive themselves. Oh ya, and they took awful pictures, however; they allowed you to view your picture much faster than previously possible. With this, and the ipod, media was going digital, and very quickly. With this new media, the issue uncovered itself. Hard drives will scratch themselves with their own arm if they are dropped while running, can overheat and damage the data, and computers will make errors when they crash causing loss of data. The creation of RAID was a quick spoken solution to this problem. Spoken, however many problems with RAID followed.
Data protection had now become in desperate need, but you were risking losing your data just by using data protection utilities. This is a part of computing that has not been developed enough because it has not been a recognized problem long enough, and has outrageous demand. People have paid hundreds if not thousands of dollars on music from things like iTunes, they have taken family pictures to preserve memories and display to those who could not be there during the moment, or see the sight. Losing these things hurt, it is like ripping a small part of your heart out. It is like erasing an irreplaceable part of your past, it is almost like you missed that special moment.
The technology is probably the most crucial part of anyones system who has already lost data, and has experienced that pain and regret for not backing up and protecting data earlier. Anyone who has gone through that pain would agree that no one should have to go through that again. It is not that expensive, so please, anyone who is reading this, back up your data before its too late.
this 100 bucks coupon is chosen at random right? gimme gimme gimme.
I wouldn’t exactly call that an “essay”, cmc.
Data safety is of utmost importance! Why? A little known fact is that trolls feed on forums, but when forum juice is low, they feed on data. I have a time machine backup that I don’t even keep plugged in, a LaCie off my router, and another computer that I triple backup the irreplaceables, like photos.
Trolls especially love old western digital drives, and once they snack they leave a tell tale sign of your drive making the dreaded click-click-click sound.
Don’t be a troll feeder — backup regularly.
Data safety is as important as having donuts with coffee. You send me coffee coupon, maybe I send you donut coupon.
Well until Mediacom Cable gets more reliable backing up to the “Cloud” isn’t working for me. I guess off-site back-up is still important so I think I’d pull a set of RAID drives when they got near full and store them at work.