What to do with nine external drives, many of them unused?

[Cubytus]

Hi there,

one day I was looking at all my external drives, and found nine, and some enclosures:

1. Two WD 250 GiB, SATA, 3.5", naked
2. One Seagate 500 GiB, SATA, 3.5", naked
3. One Seagate 1.5TiB, 3.5", FW400 enclosure
4. One WD 500 GiB, PATA, 3.5", naked
5. One G-Technology 750GiB, FW800, 2.5"
6. One OWC, 750 GiB, FW800, 2.5" (Original MBP hard drive)
7. One WD 500GiB, USB, 2.5"
8. One Acer (don't know what's inside) 500GiB, USB, 2.5"

Enclosures:

• One empty 2.5" FW800 enclosure
• USB-PATA cable + power adapter
• USB3-SATA cable + power adapter

There's also a tenth drive, a Scorpio Black 500GiB currently sitting in my MBP as it is the fastest 2.5" platter-based HDD I could find.

Current applications:

• Time Machine
• movie storage
• backuped & downloaded software, usually ones hard to come by, or the very heavy ones.
• Storage for 24 hrs videosurveillance from 3 cams, ideally 30 days archive.

As I tend to forget which holds what what, I put the naked 3.5" drives in coloured plastic cases made for them, but still feel having so many drives is more of an inconvenience than it is flexible. It doesn't seem so rational to me having so many drives, and only rarely do I need to share files with Windows (however when I do, I tend to use a FAT32-formatted partition to hold them, or a USB key).

Then again, what to do with all them?
Sell the unused ones? Cram them in enclosures? If so, which type? 3.5" is not very practical either.

I don't have any special need yet, even when it comes to storage, as long as I can have a year worth of Time Machine backups and 2TiB extra storage, which is already met through the OWC + G-Technology + WD500GiB USB, none of them being anywhere close to full. The last requirement I had was Time Machine, and I upgraded its 500GiB drive with the 1.5TiB one. However, it is still sitting in a somewhat slow FW400 enclosure, which was top-of-the-line when I got it. I don't really feel its drag since Time Machine backups are done at night, even if drive number 3 is a slower 5900rpm one.

On the other hand, considering how unlucky I have been with hard drives (out of these 10, 5 were replaced in their second year, sometimes right from the start, one was replaced twice), I think these spare drives may be dying when I would actively need them. The only one I would never depart with is the one in the OWC enclosure, since it is the original MacBook Pro 8,1 drive, and the WD 2.5" 500GiB USB as it seems to be the only one I have with 5 years warranty.

Choices?
Still, I would like higher speed from the drive that holds the virtual machines. Currently, I get 60MB/s write, 40MB/s read in Blackmagic Disk Speed Test with this G-Technology drive, which is not bad at all from a single-drive on FW800, but slow in absolute standards. This one led me to think about a bus-powered FW800 with RAID0 such as the G-Raid Mini that can saturate the bus. But if I were to get more speed out of an external drive, why not switch to a Thunderbolt drive instead? Problem is, Thunderbolt 2.5" are very hard to find and there's no option for lower capacity to mitigate their disproportionate cost. If I were to spend so much on a new drive, why not get a SSD to install in the MBP? But OCZ Vertex 4 240GiB (barely enough for internal storage) also come at a staggering price tag of $400, and internal SSD + external Thunderbolt aren't currently feasible.

I was thinking about a NAS, but then again, Synology's ones come at a large premium (over $400), and I don't tend to use my Gigabit switch thanks to the iPad's presence on the network and that I regularly have my MBP on my lap on the couch to watch movies. Besides, OS X provides no easy way to set preferences for one network connection or another for different applications, and long flashy cables accross the room are unsightly. And finally, Synology confirmed none of their home-oriented NASes currently support automated SFTP or FTP uploading, which makes them useless for videosurveillance purpose since offsite backup is a must. As well, so much money for so little performance increase over FW800 made me raise eyebrows. Even the cheapest, non-RAID NAS enclosure do come at a premium so large I wonder if it would be worth it and if I'd rather not set up the videosurveillance machine, or my other MacBook as a file server. On wifi, this white MacBook has a hard time keeping up with demand when I stream 720p content. Maybe the MacBook is too old for that, maybe wifi is too slow, I don't really know. If right, then a NAS could be a solution, albeit an expensive one.

What are your other ideas, considering the current applications?

[jav6454]

Make a huge RAID out of all of them. Simple.

If you are wondering, RAID 10 or 5 should do the trick. Also, please use GB or TB, not GiB...

[mobilehaathi]

Originally Posted by jav6454

Also, please use GB or TB, not GiB...

Besides, I suspect they are actually in GB not GiB...

[Cubytus]

Originally Posted by jav6454

Make a huge RAID out of all of them. Simple.

If you are wondering, RAID 10 or 5 should do the trick. Also, please use GB or TB, not GiB...

Yeaah, I thought about a giant RAID, but RAID either requires identical disks (they obviously aren't), at least the same connections, and I am not aware of any method to RAID so many different drives. Besides, I read that, in case of crash outside the course of normal "failure", this is extremely hard to to debug, or to backup data before it fails for good.

As for the GiB, I am following Ubuntu's (and most other Linuces) orthodox convention that Snow Leopard later adopted under its former, non-correct name: GiB.

[juanm]

Originally Posted by Cubytus

As for the GiB, I am following Ubuntu's (and most other Linuces) orthodox convention that Snow Leopard later adopted under its former, non-correct name: GiB.

If you count in GiB, wouldn't you have to actually convert from GB?

[jav6454]

Originally Posted by Cubytus

Yeaah, I thought about a giant RAID, but RAID either requires identical disks (they obviously aren't), at least the same connections, and I am not aware of any method to RAID so many different drives. Besides, I read that, in case of crash outside the course of normal "failure", this is extremely hard to to debug, or to backup data before it fails for good.

As for the GiB, I am following Ubuntu's (and most other Linuces) orthodox convention that Snow Leopard later adopted under its former, non-correct name: GiB.

My suggestion still stands. However, there have to be some modifications to your current HDD setup. To do so, sell some of the other drives to pay the way for similar spec'd ones. That way you can land a 4 disk RAID array from 9 disks you currently have. Seems like a lot of work, but other than just having JBOD. There is nothing else. That RAID can even act as your Time Machine.


As per GiB, I still hate the fact that SL and so many others changed the dynamics. It created a 3rd category sort of speaking. We have GB (manufacturer, base 10), GB (OS reported, base 2) and GiB (which is same OS reported base 2, but swapped to GB in some OSes)

[Cubytus]

Originally Posted by jav6454

My suggestion still stands. However, there have to be some modifications to your current HDD setup. To do so, sell some of the other drives to pay the way for similar spec'd ones. That way you can land a 4 disk RAID array from 9 disks you currently have. Seems like a lot of work, but other than just having JBOD. There is nothing else. That RAID can even act as your Time Machine.

And what kind of redundancy / performance improvement should I expect from a 4 disks array? And isn't is somewhat ironic to entrust data to a potentially unrecoverable setup as RAID is widely known to be when failures chain up? (Think Murphy's law here). Or should I make the RAID setup to store files, knowing that they wouldn't be online most of the time due to noise issue?

And what size 4 disks should I get to get 1.5TiB effective storage? In RAID, the "I" stands for inexpensive, which may be the case for the disk, but definitely not for the enclosure itself.

As a side comment, this setup would have to be very fast, since I can't imagine the noise that such a setup would make and that I wouldn't be able to leave it on at night.

As per GiB, I still hate the fact that SL and so many others changed the dynamics. It created a 3rd category sort of speaking. We have GB (manufacturer, base 10), GB (OS reported, base 2) and GiB (which is same OS reported base 2, but swapped to GB in some OSes)

On the opposite, I quite like it since it solved the inconsistency there was between manufacturer reported capacity and OS reported capacity.

[ucfgrad93]

I'd try and sell the ones you don't need. Make a little money, get rid of extra stuff just lying around. It is a win/win situation.

[PinoyAko]

I need a HDD. Maybe you can send me one?

[Cubytus]

Originally Posted by juanm

If you count in GiB, wouldn't you have to actually convert from GB?

in fact no, even as manufacturers claim GB, they really are GiB. Snow Leopard made the choice to report the same capacity as manufacturers do, Ubuntu and other linuces to call them what they really are.

Originally Posted by PinoyAko

I need a HDD. Maybe you can send me one?

Why not, as long as you pay for it. There will be a plastic case included.

[mscriv]

If you have marketplace access then you could post some of them up for sale here on MR if you want to do so.

Do you have a drive docking station where you can easily connect the SATA drives? My father in law uses a USB one and really likes it.

[dma550]

I would ebay the odd ones. I like to keep a bunch of small ones for offsites. Maybe give them as holiday gifts to family ?

[Cubytus]

Originally Posted by mscriv

If you have marketplace access then you could post some of them up for sale here on MR if you want to do so.

Do you have a drive docking station where you can easily connect the SATA drives? My father in law uses a USB one and really likes it.

market place? What kind? And no, I don't have a dock, as I never planned to end up with so many drives.

Originally Posted by dma550

I would ebay the odd ones. I like to keep a bunch of small ones for offsites. Maybe give them as holiday gifts to family ?

ebay is full of cheapos that want to buy brand new $100 items for $10. Or crooks. No wonder counterfeiting flourishes. So is Craigslist, but I understand there's no competition, so will give it a try anyway.

Doubt it for family. They still run on 56k because there's nothing else where they reside, so offsite isn't a solution for them. And both Windows XP and Ubuntu 10.04 don't have any provision for built-in backups (hardware limited).

[elistan]

Originally Posted by Cubytus

in fact no, even as manufacturers claim GB, they really are GiB. Snow Leopard made the choice to report the same capacity as manufacturers do, Ubuntu and other linuces to call them what they really are.

Other way around, actually. A drive marketed as 250 GB will have 250,000,000,000 bytes. This would be reported as "232.83 GB" by an OS like Windows, which incorrectly uses GB to mean 2^30 bytes, when that is actually what a GiB is. GB is 10^9 bytes.

In fact, my PC has a WD2500BEKT-75PVMT0 drive, marketed as 250 GB, reported by Windows to have 232.88 "GB". Under OSX, it would be 250 GB, which indeed is more accurate.

There is no powers-of-two restriction for file sizes or disk sizes.

When you say you have "One Seagate 500 GiB, SATA, 3.5", naked" you're claiming that the disk capacity is 500 * 2^30 = 536,870,912,000 when it actually has 500,000,000,000 bytes (or close to that.)

Back to your question - I have no ideas to suggest, sorry.