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Better storage method? Getting another external....

C

Cloud9

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 10, 2005
336
17
between flesh and thought
I have a mbp, and 2 external HDD that primarily hold images from my photography biz. Space is filling up and I need to buy another Drive to hold this years images but I feel having three externals plugged into my mbp is getting inefficient. I know that I need to get Mac Pro so I can just pop'em into the the drive bays and get better speed but in the meantime I need something that will do the job until I can afford a mac pro.

Are there such things as drive towers, or multi enclosures? I am not ready for RAID or anything like that, I would love to have all the drives in one box and have firewire with the option to go sata later.

Or if there are better ideas I would love to hear them.

Thanks!
 
If they are linked together with Firewire it should be a significant performance issue. And I don't think putting them in a tower would improve the speed significantly...
 
You might want to look at the Drobo. It isn't really a multi-enclosure in that each drive is still separate, but it isn't a RAID technically either. You can easily swap out old/small drives for new/bigger drives at any time. A bit pricey, but might be what you need.
 
I'll probably get flamed for this, but I don't really like firewire... I much prefer eSATA, get an expresscard 2 port eSATA adapter like the one Sonnet makes and get a port-multiplier aware hot-swap enclosure that can accomodate anywhere 5 drives on 1 eSATA port, since you have 2 ports, you could have 10 external drives. Go to macgurus.com (no affiliation) they can advise you on what would work for you.

If this is your business, I'd make sure you have backups of all your files, one bad hard drive failure and a year of images lost would be horrific. Take 2007 images and copy them to two hard drives, take one and put it somewhere secure and possibly offsite from your MBP.

Investing $500-600 on a setup is far cheaper than paying a hard drive recovery firm to extract data off the platters from a failed hard drive.
 
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