Question : Problem: Looking for HDD external enclosure, 2 bay, SATA hdds, AND raid 1 for a safe backup storage

Hello,

I am looking for quite some time to buy an external enclosure to make myself a decent and safe backup storage to conect to my linux server.

I have in mind of buying 2 pieces of this harddrive http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136178
place them into an external enclosure which supports raid 1 and have myself one safer backup storage of 500 GB. I'll be keeping all my work and more on it (and probably I'll do a monthly dvd backup of the really critical stuff). The thing is that I don't trust CDs and DVDs as I've seen quite a lot of them fail to be read afetr a few years. I have some backup CDs from 5-6 years ago which are no longer read by my drive. not funny.
so the idea is that if one of the HDDs fail, I'll still have the data on the otehr one. and in case both fail, I'll have the critical stuff on dvd which I hope will not go boom on me after one month :)

why I said all this? well, from my experience, it usually happens that people ask for what they want, not for what they actually need. so if you have better suggestions, please do tell.

btw, my total buget for the whole backup storage is around 350-400 us dollars. no more. so in my idea, that is 200 for the hdds and at most 200 for the enclosure. hopefully the shipping is not too expensive.

I'm from europe myself, but the order will be made for me by someone from the US and the stuff delivered to me by a friend of mine who will be returning home in a few weeks. so the only shipping costs are from wherever the stuff is located to portland.

thanks again.

Answer : Problem: Looking for HDD external enclosure, 2 bay, SATA hdds, AND raid 1 for a safe backup storage

This should do the trick:  http://www.usb-ware.com/esata-usb-raid-2-drive-ds3rpro.htm

$159 for the enclosure + $198 for your two drives ==> $357 total, which fits nicely in your budgeted amount :-)