I’ve owned dozens of hard drives in my lifetime. I’ve had, in my possession, over 10 terabytes of storage capacity although now I have around 8 terabytes of storage on 4 drives and it’s now time to add another but I don’t want to do that. I’d like to avoid buying another external drive that simply daisy chains to the existing set. That, in my opinion, would be admitting defeat to my growing desk of hard drives. One hard drive is ONLY for iTunes media. 900 films, 500 television episodes, 100 podcasts, 22,000 songs and 200 music videos. Additionally, I have 50 books, 20 audio books and over 500 apps. This takes up a 2 terabyte hard drive. I have that data replicated to a secondary 2 terabyte hard drive and make a duplicate once a month. My third hard drive is a Time Machine backup drive that replicates my nearly full 1 terabyte hard drive on the iMac. The 2 terabyte Time Machine drive, after one year of backups is nearly full as it stores changes of every file so the backup incrementally grows larger. The final drive is a two terabyte drive that stores memories. It’s full of school work, 100,000 photos, videos from my childhood, old blog posts, website backups, emails and more. It’s my life drive. It’s the drive I grab if my house is burning down. I can re-rip my DVDs and Blu-Rays. I can re-download iTunes purchases. I can’t recreate a short story that I wrote in 10th grade in Mr. Ryan’s creative writing class.
So, if the solution is to forgo adding another drive, what will I be doing. I thought about Drobo as an option. Drobo offers something unique as you have the ease of use in having a single power cable and single box to store hard drives. It’s a nice system as I can just replace drives as they die with hot swapping and upgrade storage by buying larger drives. I can set it up in RAID 0 for a single huge disk or in other configurations to make it possible to have each file written to two separate drives or any one of the RAID 0-6 configurations. It’s a nice system but the box alone costs $499 but I can get a used one on eBay for $300. The Drobo is a nice setup as it has USB 1&2 support as well as Firewire A/B. I can get a 2nd Gen Drobo with 5 hard drive bays and USB 3.0 support for $500 on eBay. This will allow for more storage and upgradability in the event that Apple ever supports USB 3.0.
If I’m going for upgradability, why don’t I buy a thunderbolt enabled drive like the Promise Pegasus R6 RAID. The 12 Terabyte system costs $1,999 (with free shipping). It’s actually similar in price to the Drobo which will set you back $499 + $150-$300 per drive (times 5 drives). The Pegasus comes with the drives. In fact, most Drobo buyers will pick up a few cheapo drives because, after spending $499, they don’t have the cash to buy server-class 10K drives at 3 terabytes each. The Pegasus is expensive (more expensive than most of Apple’s line of computers) but has the Promise name, a fantastic warranty and you can get 650 megabytes per second transfer easily (if you’re into that).
Of course, buying the Pegasus (which starts at $999 but I’d for sure go with the $1999 model) means that I’d need to get a Mac that supported the Thunderbolt I/O. This is going to make things a bit more expensive. It’s not like Firewire 800 or USB 2.0 are going away anytime soon so the Drobo is, of course, my easiest buy. My MacBook Air won’t be connecting to whatever I buy. This is for my iMac to connect to and the iMac is my streaming media server that delivers content to my television via Boxee, AppleTV and Xbox (which can all read the folders on my iMac via Samba / AFP protocols). So, in order to get the Pegasus, I’d need to sell my current i5 last generation iMac and get the newer Thunderbolt equipped models. My iMac is worth about $1500 and the new one that I’d be able to buy and actually keep for a few years cost $3,000. So, in order to get the Pegasus drives, I’d be making a $3,500 investment. That’s a big jump from the Drobo cost of around $1500 just to start.
Wait though, why are we getting ahead of ourselves and why is my AMEX sitting on my keyboard….
What was I saying? Oh, the option that I won’t go with which is just adding another hard drive. Why not? Well, I’m getting a bit frustrated by the addition of hard drives. Sure, I could use Disk Utility to put those in a RAID array which would make things easier for me but they collectively pull a lot of power. I have thought about getting two more LaCie drives (2 terabytes each) and buying one of those fancy LaCie Desk racks for their D2 Quadra drives. The drives would all stack nicely on top of each other but I’d have to deal with the 4 unsightly power cords and I could daisy chain the drives via FireWire 800. I could put those in a nice RAID configuration that would allow for parity in the event of any drive failures. They would be noisy like that and use power but I’d be investing only $600 dollars total to increase my storage from 8 terabytes to 12 which would keep me afloat for another couple of years.
One of the reasons that I’m feeling like I have tied hands though is that my iTunes Media drive is absolutely full. It’s at 2 terabytes now and I don’t want to split it up. I want to keep growing that drive and have zero issues replicating that drive to a second one once a month to ensure I always have a copy of it. My iTunes drive has 15 gigabytes free so after adding another 5 movies, I’m completely full up. That’s not good. So, if I go the LaCie route, I’m going to have to splurge a lot more for their 3 terabyte model and a 2nd one of those so I can have duplication going and always have a backup in the event of a failure. I’ll probably RAID 1 those two drives so music copied to my 3TB will be auto copied to the 2nd 3 TB for parity. The two other 2 terabyte LaCie Drives will go to Time Machine backups and files. Then, my final two drives will be released to store something else that I don’t have in my ownership yet but will one day.
After writing this, I feel like I’ve only been making that succinct argument FOR cloud storage. A lot of people assume that Apple’s iTunes Cloud service will help alleviate this very complicated setup I have but I’m doubtful and don’t expect that I’ll always have an Internet connection when I’m ready to listen to music. It’s important that we keep our data close to us and in a method that we control and own.
I’m still not sure what the solution to this is but, it’ safe to say that I surely have a dilemma.