When Leopard was released, I wanted to transition from my current backup solution which was SuperDuper to a network based external hard drive to Apple’s Time Machine.  Before switching completely to Macs I had always put together my own hardware from buying parts and putting a PC together to buying external hard drive enclosures and sticking my own hard drives in them.  This isn’t a bad way to do things.  You definitely get more for you money.  The main reason for my transition is I wanted support.  If something failed I wanted to just send the entire thing in and not have to worry about it.  So this is one example of that.  I went with Western Digital drives because they were relatively inexpensive and they look nice next to my Macs.

Within the first week of having my MacBook, I had filled the hard drive. I had purchased the black model which gave me 80 GB of storage but with all the music files, photoshop documents, web site work, and different operating systems, I knew that I would fill that hard drive in no time. I kept that in mind when I purchased the computer and knew that new perpendicular recording laptop drives were on the horizon. I was waiting for the release date of the Seagate 2.5-inch 160GB laptop drive, but the Hitachi Travelstar 5K160 160GB drive had beat it to market and I was out of hard drive space so I went with that.

I needed two IDE hard drives to fill my OWC Mercury Elite enclosure. Initially I was looking to configure the drives in a RAID 1 configuration so I bought two identical drives. The RAID 1 setup was a failure, but I was still able to use the two drives in a single drive configuration. I was using the enclosure with a Mac Mini, which was housed, in my entertainment unit. For this reason, I was looking for some drives that were relatively quiet. Also I was looking for something that had adequate speed. I was using them to backup the Mac Mini and my Powerbook G4 as well as a few websites I host offsite. I had recently purchased a Seagate 160GB 7200RPM IDE drive for a PC and was pretty happy with it. It was relatively quiet and quite fast. I was lucky enough to find a deal on the Seagate 300GB ST3300622A 7200.9 IDE drive. It was on sale at Fry’s/Outpost.com for $139.99 with a $50 mail in rebate bringing the cost down to $89.99. I usually don’t mind rebates as long as I get the money back.

I was looking for a backup solution for my Mac Mini and my G4 Powerbook. Initially I was looking for a dedicated machine to do backups but I didn’t have any old machines around to put a RAID setup in. I really don’t keep computers for that long, but this would have been a good use for it. Instead I looked into external hard drives that I could use to rsync data from my computers using cron. I searched Google for RAID enclosures and most of them uses RAID 0 stripping. I wasn’t looking for speed because I was using it as a backup unit so I searched some more for RAID 1 mirroring enclosures. Most of the time the drives were way too expensive or were so huge. It really wasn’t what I was looking for. I found one enclosure the OWC Mercury Elite enclosure that had the capability to perform RAID 1 with a firmware update. I ordered the unit for $130, and received it in a few days.