best external hard drives for archiving video?

[Anonymous]

as of right now i have two main external hard drives one 500gb that holds the first 4 years of my video in the raw avi format for the best quality and a recent 1tb drive to store the newest videos now what i want to do now is get a massive 2tb drive to store the both drives data on as a 3rd backup cause i dont like my vids being split up on two drives as opposed to being on a single big drive while i then get a 4th drive after using the 3rd for protection also i want to get a drive that transfers files by firewire cause usb 2.0 seems too slow for big avi files any suggestions on what brand to look up? something reliable that i can store and will last cause i only hope to use the drive only once or twice to transfer all the videos to and then archive and not touch it cause i know how unpredictable hard drives can be

[Rob]

I would look for a 2 disc RAID that is set up for RAID 1. RAID 1 will make 2 copies of your data on the RAID. The G-Tech G-Safe may be a good option. It holds up to 2 2TB drives – a total of 4TB but since one drive is a back up of the other, it’s really only a total of 2TB.

[Rob]

Oh yea, and whenever you fill your RAID, simply pop out the drives and save them as a disc set, and then pop in 2 new ones.

[composite1]

CMF,

Rob’s suggestion is a good one. As an addition to that, I would suggest getting an eSATA card and using Hard Drive Docks (also known as ‘Toasters’) to store your data on cheaper SATA internal drives. You can swap them out and store them as needed. Toasters come in single or dual ports but be advised that some computers due to whether they support Port Multiplier or not may be unable to see two drives at the same time via eSATA. Since the most I’ve looked at run around $60 US, it’s definitely worth a look.

[Author]

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