Out with the old, in with the new – part 4

The other day I discussed Apple’s move to DisplayPort on the new MacBooks.  Their other big news was that they completely dropped firewire on the MacBook, and only have firewire 800 on MacBook Pros. In blogger terms this is old news (over a week ago) and has already been discussed to death by many other sites. Yet for me it is still something that has to be considered at a practical level. Like it or not firewire is on the way out and I have a lot of firewire drives.  On the other hand, my brand new mac pro still has firewire and I’ll be able to use these drives for years to come.  So the wheels are turning and I’m studying different solutions.

Every few years that old Moore’s Law kicks in and new hard drives come out that double or more the capacity of the old ones.  My MOA is that whan I worry a drive is about to die, I typically copy the entire contents of the old drive into a folder on the new one.  By now I’ve done this several times over and inside a 1TB drive I might have a folder which contains a old 250GB drive and inside that I have a folder that contains an old 100GB drive, inside which I have a folder with contents from several powerbooks ago. But now it’s time to organize things better and upgrade to some serious storage.

But what storage solutions are right for my home system? What will give me the most speed, the highest capacity, and reasonable data protection for the best price?  Of course these questions can’t be completely answered without first knowing what the various applications for the storage are.  Over the next few posts I want to show some different options that I’m considering.  I also want to talk some history and review the various drives that I have now and use at home and at work.  This discussion will take several days.

First let’s establish my basic storage needs.  My applications are diverse.  On the high end I edit video and need enough bandwidth to work on HD footage in various codecs.  Now that I have an intel Mac Pro I’ll be working more in ProRes HQ, which is 220 Mbits/sec.  I’m also considering tapeless video camera’s.  This means I need fast storage and lots of it.  On the lower end I’ve got music, photos and all the typical documents.  I’m also starting to convert much of my extremely large video collection to digital files that will work with my Popcorn Hour.  This will take a LOT of space but data protection isn’t as crucial because I still own all of the movies.  A loss there would only be a loss of work, not critical data.

I am concerned about the security of my irreplaceable data.  I have thousands of family pictures and lots of videos and I never want to be one hard drive head crash away from losing something that can’t be replaced. Earlier this year we lost a powerbook hard drive and I don’t even know what all was on that drive. So my new storage solution has to protect some of the data from this type of failure.

Pictured above are the drives that I pulled out and dusted off during my clean up last week.  This represents almost 5TB of storage.  I’ll be going over each of these products as well as some others not pictured here.  Much of this gear I will be selling off.

Since there will be a lot of posts about this I’m also going to end the “out with the old, in with the new” series here at part 4.  I don’t want the next 20 posts to have this same name.  But the theme will be going on for quite a while.  Over the next few months I’ll be making a lot of changes towards “moving on”.  I’ll be selling a lot of gear, trying to raise money for new gear, possibly replacing my home theatre projector, and more.