Thursday, March 3, 2011

File Storage Upgrades: Part 6

This should be a medium-term review of the OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro and OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2.

The 2 Mercury Elite-AL Pro's are running the "not-recommended" Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB disks in JBOD. Knock on wood, so far so good. I've been rotating them in and out of an undisclosed location for off-site backup.

The Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 is utilizing 4 WD Caviar Green 1.5TB disks that most people don't recommend because they are low-power drives which means sometimes they fall off the RAID array and show up as a bad disk. They are also slow in a RAID array. Anyway, I believe one of the disks "fell asleep" and fell off the array already. The light for the 3rd drive started flashing and the unit started to beep. I immediately ordered a new 1.5TB Caviar Green disk. But before I replaced the flashing drive, I pulled it out and simply stuck it back into the RAID array. The Qx2 rebuilt the data on that disk and it's been nearly 2 week since it's been quiet. No lights. Nothing. Just the way I like it. I will probably return the extra WD drive from Amazon.

Every morning at around 3AM I begun my clone process. I have partitioned the Qx2 into a boot clone, scratch clone, and a large partition "Media Archive" which holds most of my images that I don't need immediately. Well as you'd imagine I clone the boot disk and the scratch disk first onto the Qx2. Then I clone everything on the Qx2 onto my 2-disk Mercury Elite-AL Pros.

So far so good. Knock on wood. Finally a scalable file storage solution. Just wish I could transfer via eSATA instead of FW800.

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