Mirroring Drive on a Back-up Drive

[coffeeme]

Hi,  I am new to this and have been assigned to get this set up for my company.  We have the TeraStation Duo with 2-500 Gb drives installed in a Raid 1 array-so set up for mirroring.  We purchased two additional 500 Gb drives from Buffalo and want to store the two drives off site with a mirror image of the main drive in the event of a catastrophe.  At least that is how they did it with the last network server.  We are thinking since we can hot swap in the new drives that they will immediately go through the process to mirror what is on the main drive in the TeraStations Duo.  Then we would do the second one, take the two back up drives to store off site and reinstall the original 2nd drive in the unit.  Can this be done, how will we know when the mirroring of each drive is complete and if it is not possible what is another way to accomplish the same result.  We are set up with XP Pro on all computers.  Thanks,

[Dustrega]

This would be possible with the correct care.  All you would have to do is shut the device down and replace the drive with the one you wish to mirror.  Upon starting the NAS back up it will do a quick check on whether the drives RAID information match or don't (which of course they won't with the system you're describing).  You would then access the NAS Web UI and (for a TS III) choose System->Storage and then in the RAID Array category click on RAID Array 1.  One of the disks will be unchecked, check the box and the option to Rebuild Array should be present.  With a 500 GB drive that needs to be formatted and have the data rebuilt to it (depending on the amount of data) can take anywhere between 4 and 8 hours.  I think for your setup you'd be a lot better off with external USB drives being formatted to XFS and storing those offsite.  The HDDs you use in the process you proposed will be formatted to XFS and only readable in a Linux environment, so in the event of a catastrophe you would only be able to retrieve the data from that environment (thank goodness most Linux distros have NTFS capability).  Hope this is helpful :)

[coffeeme]

Thanks for the help, just one additional question please.  I have a TeraStation Duo and when I go into System-Storage and look at the RAID Array it appears that the only option I am going to have is Rediscover Disk--is this the same as the Rebuild Array option.  Thanks