1T ExHardrive, 30 for student iMac's

[Jescompany]

Hi all. Love this forum. Need ideas:

I have 30 iMac's, none older than 3 years. 3 classes of film students and their projects that need backup. Snow Leopard. Firewire 800.

I am concerned about price and security. If possible I would wish for a secure enclosure and drive for $100.00 each.

Might have to scrub the idea of security, where to begin?

Thanks..

 

[reebzor]

What purpose will these externals have?

If security (as in people stealing them) is an issue, look into some kind of network attached storage. It might end up being a little more costly than a bunch of externals but it could serve your needs better.

 

[Tailpike1153]

That's a $3000 budget. I agree with reebzor. Think about NAS. I was looking at this for my home network. You would still have some money left over to upgrade the drives to 2 or 3TB.

 

[jtara]

Better buy fast. Hard drive prices are going up, and PC manufacturers are even constrained in their production because they cannot get enough hard drives!

The problem with NAS is "film students". They are going to be transferring a LOT of data. Gigabit Ethernet can about match the transfer rate of current hard drives. For ONE user at a time!

If we were talking desktop computers, you could upgrade the network and client computers to something faster than Gig-E. But these are iMacs, so you don't have that choice. Plus upgrading the network could potentially blow the budget, given wiring costs. (Though existing Cat5E or Cat6 could work - really depends on what wire is installed and how carefully it was installed.)

So, the OPs plan makes more sense than it might seem on the surface.

USB 2.0 is actually faster than Firewire 800. Forget the Firewire 800. You're just pushing yourself into a potentially-costly niche.

Sure, you can get a 1TB drive and external USB enclosure for $100. Many choices.

Not sure what you mean by "secure". Physical, as in bolt-down? Encrypted? Something else?

 

[stordoff]

USB 2.0 is actually faster than Firewire 800. Forget the Firewire 800. You're just pushing yourself into a potentially-costly niche.

Firewire 800 is significantly faster than USB 2.0. See these tests:

Comparing the FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 results on the MacBook Pro with the My Book Studio showed the FireWire 800 connection to be 35 percent faster at copying the file to the external drive, 51 percent faster duplicating that file on the external drive, and 37 percent faster copying over the 5000 files and folders. The AJA write test showed the FireWire 800 connection's throughput at almost three times faster than the USB connected WD, with 58 percent faster read scores.

 

[Jescompany]

Drives Drives

The purpose is for storing media for editing with Final Cut Pro. Cannot be network.



Students tend to lift anything that is not bolted. Open to enclosure of any kind, bolts? Or not at all, need drives.

Thanks