TheRealDrew

Divers on a Manta Dive in Hawaii came across a dolphin in distress. J

Regardless of the brands and/or models, hard drive failures are really a question of "when" rather than "if". Given that, I would suggest adding redundancy. RAID 0 is a non-starter, go with at least RAID 1.

No doubt, have been fortunate through the years overall in small amount of failures, and constantly backing up. Have a variety of RAIDs, mainly use 0, 1 and 5. Issue is which drives nowadays seem to have an overall better reputation. Seems to have been a shift.

Call Otherworld Computing, and get a Raid 5 system from them. Raid 5 is a great combination of speed and reliability; it takes 3 or more disks, and allows any 1 of them to fail without losing your data. However, it also increases the read speed since the data is striped across the three disks, with redundancy.

They have good warranty support, and additional coverage can be purchased.

Yup, have a few of the QX2s, and set up as RAID 5 hooked up via eSATA fairly fast. Was actually also going to try to see which drives they seem to like nowadays.

In the light of a bunch of recent posts on other forums/blogs about Drobos becoming unreliable, and when they do, the proprietary Droboshare files being useless unless you buy another Drobo, I'm thinking of another backup strategy.

I have a couple of Drobos, more so as a general holder and something that I can use older hard drives with. Never got great performance/speeds. But just one aspect of back-ups I do. I also have things like the the Mercury Elite Pro Qx2. Supports different RAID configurations. Pretty decent speeds, even on RAID 5. Not necessarily the quietest unit, but not bad. Has a FW port so you can move it further away, especially if just for back-up. After the initial back-up, incremental back-ups aren't bad. Wiebetech also has some nice units. The newer 2 Bay RTXs are REAL quiet. They have various configurations/connections and different RAID Levels. The rebuilds times are pretty good.

I usually use Carbon Copy Cloner to do back ups once a day for my drives, schedule for late at night. The first time will take longer, incremental quick.

I am going try and clean install of Lion, but it that doesn t bring significant results, I have to rather unhappily, take my wallet to the Apple shop.

Obviously a lot of people use Lion and like it. I am not the biggest fan for the reason you mentioned in terms of beach ball and all the rest. I think a clean install may be in order for me also. Seems something got messed up. On my SL partition things are fine and one base reinstall of Lion seems to be better. Got a feeling it could be software issue for me also. Just being kind of lazy in redoing it

Given that OWC have a 16Gb upgrade, you d probably get similar performance as the MBP-R so I guess the question is whether you are happy to trade a lighter unit and a retina screen for more ports (audio in, FW800) and more upgrade flexibility....

Hmmm I ll have to mull that one over, but I am guessing that only by seeing them side by side will you get a definitive answer.

Depends. If I am not quite concerned about portability/weight and the rest. The 17" with the slot. Has the connections, good working room even without another monitor, etc. Got a 6G eSata card and a 6G enclosure when I need speed. I have taken this even on trips when I know I am going to be someplace for a bit, a couple of weeks at a time or so. Curse a tad when getting it in and out at the airport. Happy when I get to where I am going. The Retina hits the spot for travel for me. Good screen, real spunky.

But a lot of this depends on what you do when at home and when you travel with the computer.