RAID enclosure. What is it?

[frldyz]

I'm currently piecing together my 2nd build.

This 2nd build is going to be very basic. Not a gaming PC or even a web browsing PC.

It will be a PC dedicated and only dedicated to to pictures and videos.
Why you ask? Why not.

I have never done a RAID set-up before. I would like to try my 1st RAID. I would like to get a couple of internal HDD's and run a RAID 1.
I currently stumbled on RAID enclosures. From the little I know these is an alternative place to store your HDD's in RAID vs inside your PC tower. Is that right?
Do these RAID enclosures set up the RAID for the HDD's? Or do I still need to go into bios?
I'm looking for the simpliest way to set up my HDD's in RAID 1.

Before anyone gives me a hard time about buying an external hard drives, HDD, flash drives, optical discs, cloud storage etc. Hear me out.

My family and I take 1000's of pictures of our family with our phone. Now that I am a father these pictures are priceless to me. I currently have all of the above for storage. But I would like a PC dedicated to this and only this. Waste of money to some. Investment to me.


Thanks everyone

 

[pete.i]

HHMM I have always thought of a raid array as a backup system which it is in way BUT you might like to have a read of this before deciding what to go for.

NEVER Use A RAID As Your Backup System! | Pete Marovich - Photojournalist and Political Photographer in Washington, DC

 

[Celery]

What you want is redundancy and the RAID system can do that for you. You'd want a drive carbon copied to the other drive but I would not leave it to them.

I'd use a DVD burner and copy onto the discs for safekeeping and that's away from the computer and maybe the house too. Fill and burn once and that's it. No rewritables and always verify the discs.

IMGburn is an excellent freeware software. I use it all the time.

You want triple redundancy as you said, they are priceless.

 

[crazyman143]

An enclosure is just that. It's a convenient way to insert the drives into the computer. Often they are made so that it's easy to swap the drives out with others.

you'll need a RAID card or an OS that supports software raid to configure redundancy. If this machine will just be used for data storage, maybe something like Unraid, Snapraid, OpenMediaVault, etc. will work well for you.