Hi, I run a semi proffesional studio (estatesound.com) on a protools HD system. G5 2Ghz with 1 Gig of ram. heres the timeline of the last week:

•1 week ago: a local-compu-genius type asked me why I had bought a SATA 250GB maxtor drive. I shrugged. he said it would go within a week.
•5 days ago: I get messages from PT telling me the drive couldn't pull audio fast enough. I burnt everything important.
•today: PT crashed. refused force quit. restarted drive is doesn't show up!

so I'll try and troubleshoot but I think its obvious that its gone. can anyone give me some insight (cost, effort, reliability)into the following and choosing between them:

•hard drive brands,sizes,etc...
•single HD vs raid array. (do I really need to do it? is it a form of back up? which level. which controller?)
•server based backup. (how quickly can it backup? how do I set it up? is it worth the trouble?)
•WC-BUS [Wax Cylinder Back-Up-System] (is it dated? where does one get the needles?)

I own a tape drive but honestly I'm just not disciplined enough to use it effectively and the tapes are tiny compared to the amount of data I generate. What I do now is just burn sessions when done (if they're quick). then, biweekly, I burn anything unburnt and reformat.

thanks for your time
-matt

Costs:
Seagate & Maxtor make good drives -
the prices between various comparable models are not very great.

For a some kind of raid array you'll need at least two drives minimum.
3 if you you go raid level 5.

If you go to raid level 5 or above you'll need a raid controller card for either
parallel ata or serial ata.

If you choose to go SCSI (very expensive) you'll get very good durable drives with less storage area. Also SCSI raid controllers are more expensive than serial or parallell ata raid controllers.

Raid Level 0 == striped array means two 120Gbyte drives gives 240Gbyte
storage very good performance writing and reading data. However if one drive
goes down the whole array is hosed - and your data is gone gone.

Raid level 1 == mirrored array all is data written/read duplicated on two drives.
Two 120 Gbyte drives equals 120Gbyte storage.
Very slight performance enhancement reading & writing data.
But if one drive goes down the array is still functional - your data is still ok
for a while.

Raid level 5 means three drives + generally a separate raid controller card.
Three 120Gbyte drives give you 240 Gbyte storage & very good safety.
If one drive goes down you just swap the faulty one and data is reconstructed back to the new drive.
Very good reading performance medium write performance. Write performance is generally enhanced through smart cache-schemes and saundry
algorithms in the raid controller.

Cheers: Dixiechicken