One terabyte (1000GB) hard drives

Looking for more storage? There are now several one-terabyte drives available. Read about them at barefeats.com and amug.org. You might also see my past article Hard Drives. I’ll be in the market for a one terabyte drive in the next few months and will report on my experiences as usual. At this point, I’d stick with the Seagate drive, based on what barefeats.com is reporting.

Installing a pair of one-terabyte drives into a Mac Pro and setting them up as a mirrored RAID (using Apple’s Disk Utility) is a great way to protect yourself against data loss from failure of one drive (assuming you put all your important data on that mirrored drive/volume). Don’t forget to make regular backups as well—see March 2 blog entry Backup Strategy.

A “mirrored” RAID is a hard drive configuration in which there is one “master” drive and one or more alternates which are exact copies of the master; all data is written to all drives simultaneously. If the master drive fails, then one of the mirror drives automatically becomes the new master. Hard drive utilities such as Soft RAID (for Mac) can automatically rebuild failed mirrors when a replacement drive is inserted.