Solution for too many external drives

Some of my ex­ter­nal drives.

If you do a lot of pho­tog­ra­phy or video projects, please don’t make the same mis­take I made by buy­ing one ex­ter­nal hard drive af­ter another.

First of all, they only stack up neatly if you buy the same brand and model en­clo­sure every time. But you’re not gonna do that be­cause bet­ter en­clo­sures come out and old ones go obsolete.

Secondly, you don’t want to have a bunch of FireWire ca­bles and power cords run­ning all over the place. Trust me, that Matrix/​sci-​​fi look isn’t worth the trouble.

The best way to go is to get a multi-​​bay en­clo­sure, mean­ing an ex­ter­nal en­clo­sure that takes mul­ti­ple hard dri­ves. No, not Drobo. Drobo is way too slow if you’re mov­ing gi­ga­bytes all the time. But you don’t need a $6000 Xserve RAID either.

Heck I don’t even think you should use RAID at all, any kind of RAID. In a me­dia archive that just keeps get­ting big­ger, you don’t need the ex­tra speed from RAID, ex­pand­ing is more dif­fi­cult with RAID, and hav­ing a backup on a sep­a­rate drive al­ready pro­tects you against a hard drive failure.

My new toy.

I pur­chased an eSATA en­clo­sure with five HDD bays (pic­tured above), but I can’t use it be­cause my eSATA ExpressCard hasn’t ar­rived yet. I plan on mak­ing two JBOD vol­umes in­side the en­clo­sure – one for the main archive and one for the nightly backup. When one vol­ume gets full, I’ll re­place a disk to ex­pand it and copy every­thing over from the other volume.

Same thing if a disk goes bad. If one disk in a JBOD vol­ume goes bad, the whole vol­ume is gone, but I’d still have a backup to copy every­thing over when I re­place the bad drive.

I’ll write more about this when I have every­thing set up. Just wait­ing on that ExpressCard. I used Amazon’s free ship­ping so who knows when it’ll ar­rive. Hopefully tomorrow.

If you’re un­fa­mil­iar with RAID, JBOD, and eSATA, go google them your­self. I’m too lazy right now.