I thought this post may serve as a useful bit of information for Melco customers (and prospective Melco customers). Someone rang me yesterday who recently bought a second hand Melco privately and the conversation we had struck a note. It obviously wasn’t the customers fault as he hadn’t visited a dealer, this is worth knowing…..
Please make sure that you have a suitably sized USB hard drive that you can connect to your Melco Back Up Socket so you can perform a proper back up of your precious music library. Hard drives these days are not exactly expensive (under £120 for 6TB), the back up itself is very easy to do (3 button presses on the front panel of the Melco) and if you format the USB drive on the Melco itself any subsequent back ups you make are incremental, i.e. they only back up the changes since the last back up, so they are nice and quick.
If you are backing up a large library for the first time it can take a little while, so always best to set it off running you go to bed.
The customer yesterday had set his N1A/1 up in a RAID 1 configuration and had not bothered with a USB back up drive as to quote the customer ‘RAID 1 automatically gives you a back up on the second internal drive’, this statement isn’t entirely correct and the customer was completely non the wiser to how the RAID and back ups work, he’ll be ordering a back up drive this weekend after our friendly chat!
The N1A/1 has 2 x 2TB hard drives and if you format the machine in RAID 1 it gives you 2TB of usuable hard drive and the other 2TB drive acts as a mirror image of the primary drive. It is not a back up of the first drive, but a MIRROR of it. Any action you perform on the main drive is mirrored on the second one. So if you accidently delete an album from the main drive via your computer (I once had a customer delete all artists starting with the letter F when his was adding some music over his network), this action is automatically duplicated on the second drive.
The main benefit for RAID 1 to give you some redundancy against hard drive failure, should one of the 2 drives fail all of the data is safe on the other drive, but it is not a back up in any way! It is totally automated and does not take into account human error!
If you want to get the very best performance from your Melco and to maximise storage format for an spanned array and buy a back up drive!
