Let the hive mind of Engadget get that for you.
"As someone who doesn't reside in the USA, I was wondering what would be the best way to get internet for my computer in the US for a couple of weeks? If it were Europe I know I'd look for some prepaid data. Is there anything similar offered by American carriers? A MiFi or a data SIM that I can tether from would work, but I'm trying to maintain a tight budget. Help!"
I would seriously beg you to reconsider on not going with a RAID configuration, while not totally secure since redundancy is only half the equation, it will give you better projection. While RAID 0 makes your buy two disks while only getting the space of one, you can sustain a 1 disk failure and not lose any data. Not only that, but replace the failed disk and you are off and running again with redundancy. If you are looking for more space, RAID 5 or 6 is what you want. RAID 5 is going to be the most common and most economical, RAID 6 is meant more for large arrays. RAID 5 requires at least 3 disks, but you can have more. You only lose the space of one of the drives and again, can sustain a 1 disk failure. Redundancy is a must if any of the data on there is valuable to you, even if it the value is time, like ripping all of your CDs. With hard drives being so cheap these days, I think it is kind of silly to not give yourself at least some protection.
If you can't be swayed to use redundancy, I have heard the Buffalo products are good. You might also want to consider something like the Popcorn Hour A-110. It is a media streamer, but also has room for a 3.5 SATA hard drive, which will give you the ability to share it out to your network and it even has a bittorrent client built into it. If you are tech saavy even a little, I would also suggest going the DIY router. FreeNAS or OpenFiler will take care of all the heavey lifting as far as managing of everything, they are tailored BSD (FreeNAS ) or linux (OpenFiler) distros specifically designed for this purpose. All you need is a PC with enough space for all the hard drives you want to put in it. You can do RAID or LVM (which will allow you to combine all sorts of drives of different sizes into a logical volume) and share it through SMB/CITS (Windows Sharing) or NFS and manage it all through a nice web based interface.
You'd be talking about Raid 1 instead of Raid 0 in your first example :-)
Raid 0 has 0 redundancy.
Just one minor quibble with your post, zargon: what you first describe as RAID 0 is actually RAID 1 (two drives mirrored for redundancy). RAID 0 is striping, so you get the storage of both drives; however, if one drive fails, you lose all of the date on both drives.
Otherwise, yes, RAID is good for redundancy in case of hardware failure, but is not a complete backup solution--especially against accidental deletions, etc. Too bad manufacturers have not stepped up with consumer-friendly, relatively-inexpensive external backup solutions to keep up with the amount of data people are now storing. Perhaps Blu-Ray will be a good solutions, especially if Pioneer brings the 400GB variety to market.
Yeah, it has been a long week and I for some reason always get those mixed up, even after talking about it just last week.