I have about 500 gigs of movies music and photos I would like to move this to a separate storage off of my 24 inch iMac so i have more power and space for video editing. While speed is important for photo editing and video playback it is not everything to me.
With your iMac you basically have three options, of which two are viable.
USB:
I'd say you get what you paid for. USB (2) has a maximum throughput of roughly 35MB/s. More than enough for video playback, too less for copying large amounts of data, though.
Ethernet:
Up to 110MB/s provided that you've got a really good NAS ($1000+ devices reach this throughput) and a decent switch. This is as fast as you can get with your iMac. Might be a little overkill for your application, though.
Firewire800:
This seems to be the sweet spot for your needs. Transfer rates of up to 80MB/s for a good price. Enclosures that have FW are a little bit more expensive than USB only devices, but not that much and the performance increase is definitely worth it, especially if you're constantly moving large amounts of data from your iMac to the drive and vice versa.
I am highy confused by RAID and know I will mess it up.
I have researched DROBO for storage and just want to know if those whom complain about speed are just on a much higher level and looking for more than me. Also seems like there are reliability issues. It seemed much cheaper was thinking about JOBD set up with TowerRaid TRUT5. Then I could probably buy two and use one to back up the other. Thoughts?
The transfer rates of the FW800 are about 50MB/s read and 35MB/s write. Not as high as other RAID systems, but still fast enough for a pure data storage solution like in your case. Streaming video won't be a problem.
The reason why people go with a RAID system is generally for capacity, speed or availability (or with parity based levels all of them).
Speed can be erased from this list in your case since you will always be limited by the connections your iMac provides. Single mechanical hard drives can already saturate any possible connection of your iMac.
So we're basically down to capacity and availability.
How much storage do you actually need and does it have to be always available?
Keep in mind that RAID is no means of backup. What a security designed RAID (1 and parity levels) level does, is keeping data available if a drive failure has occurred. It is no backup.
So regardless of which RAID level or device you use (if you're going with RAID altogether), you'd still need a proper backup.
My needs are simply to expand my music and movies and keep it safe and secure. While making the backing up process as easy as possible. Best programs that auto copies new data over. Any one know?
How do you specify auto copy?
What I do is using Carbon Copy Cloner to back up the data on my computers to local file servers or local external drives. The backup to the servers are scheduled on a daily basis at night since the server is always present.
The backup to external drives can be scheduled with CCC as well. It incrementally backs up all new data to the drives as soon as they get connected to the computer, which means as soon as I turn them on.
Try CCC, really a great program for backups (clones of your iMac's boot drive as well) which is also free.
