Storage....Raid 5...or just get more backup drives?

["noel" <noel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,
Lots of talk of storage on here recently with many it seems going for WHS
as the answer.
I'm trying to remove my Windows box from the equation and move all to my
mac mini.

Currently have around 2TB of movies and a need for more space as that's
pretty much full now.  I want something I can plug into the mini and share
from that to xboxes etc (planned to do over SMB) but I'd also like either
some redundancy or backup of the 2-3 and growing Tb of data.

At the moment I have 4 drives in two 2 bay enclosures plugged in via USB 2.
 They do the job ok so far.

It seems if I want Raid 5 then I have to go for some external enclosure
like Drobo, Synology etc which all seem pretty expensive.  Alternaticely
I'm thinking if I say had 3Tb of data storage, I can pretty cheaply get a
further one or two backup drives and automate the backup process with the
drives elsewhere in the house hung off say a timecapsule or similar.

Now I know there's additional electricity consumption with this method but
is there anything I'm missing here?

Could I for example have 2 hard drives in a 2bay enclosure both set to
backup to individual folders on a larger single hard drive? i.e. 2x 1Tb
drives backing up to 1x2Tb My Book USB hard drive for example.

Any thoughts here, what are others on Macs doing about storage, backup etc.

This is only my movies and music I'm really talking about here.  Everything
else photos, documents etc is getting backed up to timecapsule, and
documents to idisk with further options on the way especially in regard to
my photos backup.

Thanks all

Noel



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