Hey there.

I am currently running on a ("little" ) 60 GB drive, but it's been running with me for a few years now and I'm looking to upgrade to some new storage components. Why? First, because 60GB just isn't big enough anymore, and second, because I want a back-up solution.

I'm thinking of two (maaaaybe three) solutions right now, and I was hoping to get some opinions on them.

A. Grabbing two "Samsung Spinpoint T166" for ~$100 each as both: an upgrade to 500 GB and instant back-up by putting them into RAID 1 (mirroring) with my on-board RAID controller

B. Grabbing one newer drive (either the above Spinpoint or maybe a Raptor) and getting an external backup solution. BUT that would only really work if the external solution had some kind of redundancy, otherwise there is no difference from just throwing a second drive into my tower.

C. Grabbing that one newer drive and using one of those online back-up storage places (Tom's did a review on them recently). I'm considering this because the stuff I'm worried about (old school projects, personal documents...) I shouldn't really need emergency access to, so if I can't access the internet for some reason, it's OK. I just want to make sure they stay intact until I can re-synch at some later point. I also assume I'd be able to access any file from any computer connected to the net, right? And when you consider the price, it's pretty cheap if you think how many months of charges it will take to reach the price of a HD... and at that point there's a decent chance the drive would have already died. I dunno, I'd have to talk myself into this one, but it doesn't seem like such a bad idea on the surface.


So what do you think? Thanks for any thoughts!!