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.
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Tags: Drobo, photography, video
March 17th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
[...] and set up my new external enclosure. Right now I’m moving a little over 1 TB of stuff from four separate drives to the new JBOD volume (or “Concatenated Disk Set”, according to Apple), named Archive [...]
March 20th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
have you seen my setup yet? i can’t remember.
March 20th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Nope.
March 20th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
[...] I mentioned before (here and here), I got an eSATA 5-bay external hard drive enclosure to replace my existing FireWire [...]