I’ve been using a 500GB Apple Time Capsule as a target for backing up by Macbook Pro via Apple’s Time Machine application. It’s convienent and works well. The system is not without flaws though. I’ve looked at the single hard drive in the Time Capsule and thought about how it was a point of failure. I don’t know why Apple wouldn’t have come out with a solution that offered a pair of drives in a RAID, so if one failed, the other would be there to save the day.
I just saw today that a company called Stardom is offering a device they call the Safe Capsule. It’s basically a USB based dual bay hard drive enclosure that offers RAID 1 and JBOD. It is styled to look like a Time Capsule, so you can stack them and keep with Apple’s fancy looking theme. It also provides 3 USB ports that you can use to add more external drives, printers, etc to your Time Capsule system.
Sure the Time Capsule has a USB port that will accept any external USB hard drive, but there aren’t many out there that offer RAID to reduce the chance of data loss due to drive failure. That’s one of the big things that attracts me to the Safe Capsule. RAID 1 is a system that creates mirror images of drives, so if either one fails the other one is exactly the same. JBOD, or Just a Bunch Of Disks, isn’t truely a RAID type since it offers no redundancy. It takes two disks and combines them so they appear as one. Files are written to one or the other. It’s appealing to some people since you get all the storage you pay for. With RAID 1, when you buy two 1TB hard drives you get 1TB of storage that is protected by a redundant drive. With JBOD you get 2TB of storage from your drives. I don’t see a benefit to this for my use since I want the redundancy.
The Safe Capsule is sold without drives so you can use your own SATA drives and pick whatever capacity fits your budget. Even thought it’s a fairly new product, I did find that it is available already from NewEgg. I’m really considering adding one to my Time Capsule to have some redundant storage.
