- Saturday, 11 July 2009
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I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true - Dorothy Parker
WD Mirror drive brings Raid back-up to the masses
WD HAS ADDED TO the My Book line-up with its latest hardback – the Mirror Edition, the firm's dual-drive RAID 1 based version for Windows.
The drive comes in 2TB and 1TB flavours and automatically stores valuable personal data not once but twice, in a mirrored drive format. Taking either two 1TB or two 500GB drives and duplicating the data from one to the other in real-time, also known as RAID 1 to luddites out there.
Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition
This iteration of the popular external drive is aimed at those anxious individuals of the world, so they can back up that ever so important digital content but it comes now with added fault tolerance.
Although we suspect it’s just a natural evolution to WD's product range, it’s still a nice idea to see RAID coming down to the masses seeing as most of us spods have been using it for some time.
"Our new My Book Mirror system helps users sleep easy, knowing that their data is safe," bragged Jim Welsh, vice president and general manager of branded products and consumer electronics groups for WD
Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition
Out of the box, the, uh, box is configured to RAID 1, but can be set up as striping in RAID 0, if so wished.
Connections to a PC from the back of the Mirror are in the form of a solitary Mini-A USB 2.0 connector. We expected to have seen more ports there, as this does parallel the firm's Mac Studio My Book Edition II – only for a Windows platform. That version ships with eSATA, FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0, but this offering is left crying into its single port.
WD My Book Mirror Edition dual-drive storage system is available now at select retailers with 1 TB at $289.99, Euro209 and £169.99; 2 TB coming it at $549.99, Euro379 and £309.99.
Backing up your data twice has never been so redundant. µ
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LOL!

Okay I had too much to drink.

I also thought the poolparty thingy was hilarious, only wish I had a pool...
A correct factoid or an error ?
... RAID is not and does not replace backups. RAID is for high availability and/or performance.
'Cynic', a mirrored RAID stores copies of data on the second drive, that means you can back up your data on it (in this case externally) and if a drive fails you can still retrieve it and add a new HD.
And an USB-only drive obviously is not designed to use RAID as a speedup.
Unfortunately that theoretical advantage is lost if firmware updates mess up the whole setup and wipes the data on both drives of course, as a commenter on another forum reported happening to him.
What is 'high availability' suppose to mean anyway? Never mind I guess.
Cynic, repeat after me: "Without RAID I do not have backup." :-)

RAID 1/5 protect against data loss caused by disk failure. It means you get 24/365 backup.

RAID does not protect against users who accidentally delete or unwittingly distort data, it simply ensures that those undesirable states are present in redundant form.

Traditional backup is, therefore, a necessary but often times insufficient adjunct to RAID.

Backup policies provide intermittent snapshots of our data. RAID retains the most current version of our data. Sometimes we need to keep a complete history of changes. This is provided by other systems, such as relational databases and version control software.