MacBook Air Transient Storage

[willgreene99]

I was looking for guidance from others who may have already travelled down this path. I am needing bigger and bigger drives for storing of photo's, movies, and media, like songs and such. I am getting to the point where I really don't want to house a mini-datacenter in a closet just to store all of it. I was thinking, isn't there a better way that I can take pictures with my iPhone, sync them down to my Air via iCloud, share them with friends and then archive them to a photo-sharing site like flicker or picasa or other? This should work for photo's, but what about movies, songs (iTunes Match?), family movies of the kids, etc?

What have some of you done? added bigger raid drives? Used a backup service?

I appreciate your responses.

 

[GGJstudios]

I was looking for guidance from others who may have already travelled down this path. I am needing bigger and bigger drives for storing of photo's, movies, and media, like songs and such. I am getting to the point where I really don't want to house a mini-datacenter in a closet just to store all of it. I was thinking, isn't there a better way that I can take pictures with my iPhone, sync them down to my Air via iCloud, share them with friends and then archive them to a photo-sharing site like flicker or picasa or other? This should work for photo's, but what about movies, songs (iTunes Match?), family movies of the kids, etc?

What have some of you done? added bigger raid drives? Used a backup service?

I appreciate your responses.

Using online storage is certainly an option, but not ideal for very large files, like movies. Of course, online storage depends on internet access, which may not always be available. An external hard drive is useful for both backups and as additional storage. It doesn't have to be in a RAID setup.

I've been very pleased with both of these, from Other World Computing (OWC):

OWC Mercury On-The-Go Pro..........................OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro™

 

[notjustjay]

I've been going down these lines as well. I upgraded my current MacBook Pro's hard drive from its stock 120 gig to a new 750 gig drive and it was like a breath of fresh air. However, I am seriously considering a MacBook Air as my next computer and am wondering how I will ever go back to 128 gigs of SSD (well, maybe 256 will be the norm by the time I take the plunge).

I have a NAS downstairs, a DNS-323, but it is incredibly slow. I also have a variety of USB external hard drives, but plugging and unplugging and "rats, I don't have that file, I forgot to bring the drive" gets old quick.

I have a suspicion that the best solution is going to be a Mac or PC sitting in the basement with a huge hard drive acting as a media and file server. It can also stay network connected so you can pull any file off it, remote into it, etc. from anywhere.