I’ve been talking about storage for a very long time. Just check all of the blog posts that reference it. Most recently, I put most of the long-time issues behind me by setting up a NAS in my home with 12 terabytes of storage. Here’s today’s setup:
- Synology NAS w/ two 6-Terabyte WD Red Hard Drives
- One 4 Terabyte LaCie Blade Runner USB3 plugged into the NAS (Time Machine for 3 computers that back up over the network)
- One 2 Terabyte Western Digital MyBook USB2 plugged into the NAS for things I can afford to lose but don’t want to get rid of
- Two 4 Terabyte LaCie D2 Quadra Drives plugged into my iMac 27” upstairs. They’re FW800 daisy chained but connected to my iMac via a Thunderbolt to FireWire 800 adapter
The setup is very simplified from where we were just 6 months ago. Still, every single hard drive in my house is at 75% capacity.
The one drive plugged into my iMac is a production drives as a temp storage cache for Final Cut Pro, iMovie, Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom 5. It’s also full of scratch files from personal projects I work on and those final projects once completed get moved to my NAS. The second LaCie drive is actually full of some files that simply don’t fit on the NAS such as ‘life archives’ going back to 1997 when I first started creating digital content like blog posts, photos, movies, school work and a lot of archives created for my dad like flyers for his personal training, things like that. I’d love to be able to fast-forward to 2020 and have dual 10-terabyte drives in my NAS and therefore completely store all of my archives on the NAS w/ just one drive for Time Machine backups attacked to is via USB.
That’s not possible today.
Basically, I want to eliminate all hard drives from my office because my office is also where I sleep (1 bedroom house) and the LaCie drives almost never turn off and they’re quite loud adding too much white-noise to an otherwise quiet house on the lake.
So I’ve been shopping around for some options that I can plug into the NAS to make this current annoyance go away. What I need is:
- Lots of storage (at least 10 terabytes)
- Not a lot of disk speed (5400 RPM is fine)
- USB3 of eSATA connectivity (ThunderBolt would be nice)
- Reliability
I was looking at the LaCie 8big Rack Thunderbolt™ 2 but it’s only Thunderbolt but basically a reliable 1U Rack-mounted 12 terabyte configuration (that’s expandable) sounds like heaven. Let’s take an exact opposite approach. There’s the new WD My Book 6TB USB 3.0 3.5′’ that is at an attractive $249 price. I can buy 2 of these for $500 and retire the two LaCie drives that I’ve literally had since 2008 (pictured below in 2009)
The hard drives in the enclosures died a while ago and I upgraded them 2 years ago to a larger model. I can also retire that 2 terabyte My Book Drive from 2009 so basically eliminating 1 full hard drive from my setup and adding 2 terabytes of additional storage to the network. Not a bad idea. It would be a slight power savings and eliminate the noise from my bedroom.
I’ll have to ignore the consideration that using a network drive @ 5400 RPM for a Final Cut Pro scratch drive might be impossible but if it is, I can grab an ultra Quiet recently updated LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt™ that carries a terabyte of storage via ThunderBolt for $199. it’ll remain behind my iMac and the enclosure is so thick that you get very little noise. The drive is slow @ 5400 RPM but it’ll be directly attached to the iMac so therefore a pretty efficient operation.
Until 8-10 terabyte 3.5” drives become a reality, I think the next network update will be purchasing two of the WD 6TB USB3 drives and one of the Rugged Thunderbolt drives and that will increase total storage by 3 terabytes, reduce energy costs and noise and make storage far simpler. New Setup:
- 12 Terabytes in the NAS
- 4 Terabytes via Blade Runner on NAS for Time Machine
- 6 Terabytes WD MyBook on NAS for Life Archives
- 6 Terabytes WD MyBook on NAS for everything else OR a duplicate of Life Archives in case complete failure happens on first Mybook
- 1 Terabyte LaCie ThunderBolt connected to iMac as a scratch disk.
This will also mean that finally all of my drives are low-power USB 3 / Thunderbolt drives bringing me into the modern era.
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Another note on network miscellaneous things, I did check out the Retina iMac in an Apple Store yesterday (nearest store is almost 2 hours away). It’s gorgeous in person but I think I’m going to wait for the first refresh to grab one. Just a peronsal decision but it is gorgeous and very fast. I also got to see a Mac Pro in person for the first time. What an amazing machine.