NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hi I hope you may be able to help.

Currently I have my naslite box with 2x500gb ide/pata drives that boots from separate smaller hdd, in an old AMD300 pc.

I'm in transition, splitting the everyday pc in to two, one pc for everyday stuff, pictures, documents etc and the other for music storage and playback, the laptop seems to have become video storage/plugs in to tv.

After what seemed like never ending trouble with my first try at a back up, with a Lacie external hdd, I like to have three copies of data, one on the every day machine, one on an external disc and one in the naslite box.

Now, I almost have 3 separate computers each with an internal hdd that needs to be backed up to an external drive and then to the naslite box.

I understand the "AMCC 3Ware 9500S-4LP SATA Raid Controller 128MB 4 Ports" cards work well with naslite, this would also allow me to come a little more up to date with sata. But could it be configured, if I attached 3 hdd's, to mirror the 3 separate computers, each on to their own separate hdd in the naslite box?

Many thanks for any thoughts,

Cheers
DC

Well after reading over and over again the instructions for the 3ware card, I'm not that brill with computers

I think my only option with the 3ware card is RAID 0, I don't understand the JBOD or single disc just yet.

From what I understand I could back up the three pc's on to the RAID 0 as it would look like one big disc?

I use robocopy at the moment, would this still work with the naslite 3ware raid 0 set up?

Many thanks for any thoughts!
cheers
DC

RAID0 is simply a stripe across all the drives in the array with no parity. Loose one you loose the whole thing. There are recovery tools but...

JBOD is simply a bunch of disks that are written to, one after another as each fills up. When disk0 is full that the data is stored on disk1 etc.

Single disk is just that, one disk that is not a part of a JBOD or a RAID array.

If it were me I would be looking at RAID5 or even RAID6 as a backup repository. Better yet two arrays with a mirror from one to the other.

Mike

Thank you Mike for the explanations.

Two arrays with a mirror from one to the other does sound pretty good, something that I will probably work on once one of my existing pc's gets retired to another naslite machine.

The external hdd's that I'll be using shortly 1/pc will be backed up on the naslite, it was just a matter of at the moment I have 2 hdd's in the nas, two external and two pc's, so each pc has all its data mirrored twice, to external drive and to nas drive.

Now I'm looking at three pc's to mirror, twice, I need another ide hdd in the nas and keep it simple, or switch over to sata drives with a sata controller.... just wondering if something like the the AMCC 3Ware 9500S-4LP SATA Raid Controller 128MB 4 Ports would allow me to have 3 drives all with their own labels so I know which is back up drive is for what machine?

Cheers
DC