I have several question about the differences in hard drives and system backups.

[CheckMarc]

I'm needing to back up my computer but I can't afford an NAS now so I was going buy the Hard drives and back the data up on them until I can. Yes it's a pain to have to install and remove them each time but I'll only be doing that once a week at most.

First is there are real advantage to raid versus just having a back up? I've read articles that go both ways.

There are a lot of NAS "specific" hard drives are they interchangeable with a regular hard drive? Is there a cost advantage to using them? They're over twice the price.

Last do I use the old drive for back up since it's not going to be used as much or use the new drive?

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there, CheckMarc!

If you cannot afford a NAS at the moment, I'd suggest getting an external HDD for backup.
As for you questions:
There are different RAID configurations for different purposes.
If we're talking about backup - RAID 1 (mirror) is what you are looking for. Its advantage over the regular backup is that you have a minimum of 2 HDDs (preferably NAS/RAID compatible) and this array saves your data duplicated in both drives. So if one of them fails, you can easily swap the failed drive with a new one and still have all your data on the other drive.

Why NAS 'specific' drives? I can talk about WD Red drives which are specifically for RAID/NAS environments. They have the so-called TLER feature (time-limited error recovery) which prevents you from rebuilding your RAID/NAS over and over again. This feature prevents HDDs from being dropped out of the arrays and provides more availability and less downtime for rebuilding the configuration. They are tested to survive in 24/7 environment and due to their Intellipower they also run cooler, so overheating won't destroy your array.

As I already mentioned, your best solution at the moment would be to backup to an external hard drive. Even if you build your NAS/RAID later on, you will have one additional backup storage that you can use for system image or OS recovery image.

Hope this helps you.
If you have more questions, feel free to ask!

SuperSoph_WD