Remeber to make it RAID 1 or better.

RAID0: 2 or more drives striped together to form one big drive. A pair of 250GB drives will become one big 500GB disk. If one drive fails, you lose everything. Advantages: more space without seperate drive letters, faster read speed than one 500GB disk. Disadvantages: Lose one drive, lose it all.

RAID1: 2 or more drives mirroring eachother. Two 250GB drives are represented as one 250GB drive. If one drive fails, the other still has everything on it. Advantages: redundancy, faster write times. Disadvantages: Double the cost for the same ammount of space.

RAID2-4: various combinations of the above and something magical called 'parity'. I don't really remember what the various specs are for 2-4, but I'm sure something like Wikipedia can tell you if you really want to know.

RAID5: 3 or more drives striped together with parity. 3 250GB drives will give you about 500GB of space. 5 250GB drives will give you about 1000GB (1TB) of space. Lose one drive, just replace it and wait for the controller to rebuild the array. Advantages: Great redundancy, really fast read times, not so much investment for space returned. Disadvantages: Sometimes slower write times while parity calculates (but usually not noticeable), the disks may not be readable on anything but that particular controller card/chip, still expensive (3 disk minimum and some space used by parity).

RAID 0+1/1+0 (sometimes called RAID 10): Various strategies of mirroring and striping, combining RAID0 and RAID1. Depending how it's built, it can be quite fault tolerant, or quite fast at either reading or writing. Usually not necessary for anything less than a major datacenter environment. Advantages: Incredible fault tolerance, darn good speed. Disadvantages: holycrapexpensive. (minimum 4 disks, and you only get 2 disk's worth of space). Not recommended.


Most SATA controllers out there will support RAID0 and RAID1, so get a pair of identical disks and make them a RAID1 array. Some of the more expensive controllers support RAID5, and there's software out there that'll run RAID5 on any controller, but the 3 disk minimum makes things get more expensive.


So. My recommendation: Get a SATA card that supports RAID1, a pair of SATA disks, set up the array, and get a CD or DVD burner that you can backup to regularly. You should be able to schedule backups, but you'll have to manually swap disks to burn to. The RAID will generally keep things sane, but in case of major explodage in the computer, you'll have the backup disks. I suggest taking these disks home with you, as offsite backup is better than onsite (think fire or similar). Remember, now that I mention fires, that 'fire proof' safes generally mean that they won't let the internal temp get high enough to have paper ignite, but that optical media and floppy disks melt at much lower temperatures.

ETA: holy crap I'm a geek.

ETA2: I guess I might have just volunteered myself to take on the job. I'm more than willing to do so but work nights and wouldn't be able to swing by till Friday. PM/email me if you wanna talk about it.