ToughTech Duo QR

[pwatkins]

I'm with Michael on most things, but the ToughTech Duo QR is *very* expensive.  Extremely expensive.  And it apparently only allows up to 750 gig drives.  One of my favorite vendors for this kind of equipment (Oyen Digital) sells a device with nearly identical specs for $109 without drives, and that system allows and is also sold with 1TB drives.

I'm just sayin'.

--Paul Watkins

[dreed]

Michael, you mention (correctly) that heat is a cause of hard drive failure and that the device monitors the heat of the unit.

From the pictures, it appears that there is no active cooling - is that correct?

If so, are there any specification limitations on hard drives in terms of RPMs or power consumption?

Finally, in your use of the device, did you ever find that it shut off due to it deciding things were too hot?

Darren

[michael]

Paul – looks like a good price, but it's significantly larger than the ToughTech.

It's passively cooled, and therefore quiet.

It's never shut down on me, even on a 30C day after hours of use.

Michael

[Craig Arnold]

Looks great.

Put in a couple of these babies and you should be good to go. :-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT1CRwqEv_8&feature=player_embedded

[Jonathan Cross]

This looks a useful device, but...  I have a laptop with USB3.0, and I would find the USB2 of this device rather slow for backing up 4GB of wildlife images.

Jonathan

[dchew]

I'm ignorant and curious about the backup strategy with a third hard drive.  I have a RAID 1 backup here at home but have never tried swapping out a drive.  When you install the third drive after it has been sitting out as a backup, does it rebuild from scratch or is there some evaluation in the RAID system that compares and updates changes?  In other words, every time you swap in/out the third backup do you have to wait for it to rebuild/overwrite the entire drive from scratch?

Dave

[michael]

On the ToughTech, and most hardware-based RAID systems, as soon as a new drive is mounted it automatically is compared to the remaining drive. If it isn't exactly identical in its content the controller makes it so in the background.

You can start working right away with both existing files as well as loading new ones, and the controller does what it needs to do in the background, automatically.

This is the advantage of a RAID 1 system over simply having a second drive attached and using copy software. The synchronization takes place in real time without user intervention. As long as you use a strategy of having a third drive which is swapped in and out occasionally, and kept physically separate, you have a no-brainer automated file safety solution.

Michael

[dchew]

Ah, nice. Thank you for the explanation. 

Dave

[joedecker]

It's a great-looking gadget, but where possible I'm still going with a laptop and a separate image storage device for redundancy, not two disks in the same device.

See, there was this short in the wiring of the hosteria in El Calafante I was in, and the fuse on my laptop made the most elegant sizzling sound. It was fortunate the other backup device wasn't plugged in at the time, the short took out lots of electronics over three buildings. (And moreover, it was "fortunate" that I took the time then to figure out how, after having lost power on the first device, I was going to continue to have two separate copies of images I made during the rest of the time.)

Still, if I *couldn't* bring a laptop...

Joe

[michael]

Not all products with similar specs are priced the same. It's as simple as that. The cheapest isn't always best (and of course neither is the most expensive).

Michael

[PierreVandevenne]

OWC sells the GMAX Mini mobile RAIDs for a fraction of the price: http://eshop.macsales.com/owcpages/guardianmax_mini.html

FWIW, most of these are virtually identical, based on the Oxford 934/936 (depending on interface choice/encryption/etc) chipset (936 in this case).

http://www.plxtech.com/products/consumer/das

[Wayne Fox]

I've been using a maximusMini for quite some time, equipped with 2 7200 rpm drives.  Mine has eSata as well as FW 800, and I use it as a Raid 0 for speed, so I make second copies to my internal laptop drive when importing.  The reason for me is also have to use this as a "work" drive quite often, connected to my laptop at my store.  It is then backed up via eSata to a 8TB raid 5 device on my main computer.  I've been quite happy with the unit.

The big difference would be in backup strategies.  The maximusMini drives are not easily swappable, thus when using it the second backup must be to a different device, rather than to a 3rd drive.  Certainly either strategy makes sense as long as one doesn't shortcut their own methods.

Sounds like either device can be a good tool for traveling photographers.