Dumb? Confused

Hi - Newbie to forum but any advice would be appreciated.
Have an iMac with 500 GB HD and am rapidly running out of space (Avid photographer lots of images) so am looking to increase storage capacity.
I have an external raid (G-Tech 1TB) that I use for back-up but want some form of external hard drive to store all my Pics and itunes and remove the images from my 'C' Drive on the mac (I will be using F'wire 800)
As an aside I use Adobe Photoshop/Aperture 3 for post production.
I looked at a G-Tech g-drive but a 'techy' tells me I should get something like a Drobo (Raid) enclosure expandable etc.
Various reviews seem to contradict External HD vs Raid Enclosure some are particularly scathing of the Drobo?
Does anybody out there have first hand knowledge/experience/advice in respect of which route I should follow??

Many Many Thanks

Confused

MVX

I can't advise you with regard to the Drobo Raid unit as I have never used one. But as far as storing photos goes, redundancy and reliability is very important. Just make sure whatever it is you decide to do, that you have a "fail safe" system or as near "fail safe" as you can get it. Of course that means $$$.

Regards.

MVX said:

Have an iMac with 500 GB HD and am rapidly running out of space (Avid photographer lots of images) so am looking to increase storage capacity.
I have an external raid (G-Tech 1TB) that I use for back-up but want some form of external hard drive to store all my Pics and itunes and remove the images from my 'C' Drive on the mac (I will be using F'wire 800)

Click to expand...

It sounds to me that you are generating lots & lots of photos...and this will probably continue in the future...and thus you may continue to fill up hard drive after hard drive. Eventually (in my humble opinion)..."burning" some of your older...less used photos...to a CD or DVD disk or disks would probably be a more efficient solution than hard drive storage....and this would/could serve as a backup method as well.

By the way...Macintosh computers don't have a "C" drive!!!

- Nick

By the way...Macintosh computers don't have a "C" drive!!!

Click to expand...

Mine does. Every time I boot to Windows 7!

(Just thought I'd pull your leg a bit Nick)

Regards.

Thanks Folks
Yea referred to 'C' drive as means of distinguishing which HD i was referring to - No worries there is no going back to windows no matter what.
Get enough of that kind of stuff at work
Thanks for the comment - unwilling to 'backup' to DVD etc as they deteriorate over time albeit HD's do fail

Still unclear what to do in the longer term!

S

chscag said:

Mine does. Every time I boot to Windows 7!

(Just thought I'd pull your leg a bit Nick)

Regards.

Click to expand...

Ugggh...[size=+1] "C" drive[/size]...I had to go throw up when I read that!!!

- Nick

MVX said:

Thanks for the comment - unwilling to 'backup' to DVD etc as they deteriorate over time albeit HD's do fail

Still unclear what to do in the longer term!

Click to expand...

Just the other day I installed Mac OS 7.1 from the original 17 year-old floppies on one of my Mac's. Floppies are much more prone to "time degradation" than CD's/DVD's. And these were SEVENTEEN years old!

I have 15+ year old CD's that are just fine! CD's/DVD's (as a backup medium) are a lot less expensive than hard drives. Even if every 5-10 years you burn new copies of your backup CD's/DVD's is not that big of a deal.

This was purely a financial suggestion (CD's/DVD's cheaper than hard drives). If you got BIG bucks to buy additional hard drives to store files...go for it!

- Nick

I have seen bad reviews on the Drobo devices as well, but mine has worked flawlessly without one issue. I have 4 500GB drives in mine right now, and the plain jane bottom line unit can expand up to 16TB. As your system gets full you can pull a 500GB drive and put in say a 2TB drive and let the system rebuild it for you. I have heard the re-build time can be considerable, but I don't have any real world experience to report.

You get a nice little GUI that gives the health of the drives as well as used and available capacity.

I'm not saying this is the perfect way but this what I do. I also have a lot of files I store outside of my computer so I needed a backup solution for them. A RAID was kind of an expensive solution for me and DVDs was too impractical for me because I was starting to get several storage bins full of DVDs. I also have a lot of images and it was quicker to find an image by connecting the external HD with my whole image collection and then doing a search rather than inserting one DVD at a time and trying to find it that way. You have to be very good at organizing and properly labeling your image collections on DVDs in order for you to find exactly the image you are looking for quickly. I'm not that organized.

So in order to backup my external HD I bought another external and then basically cloned my first external HD. The first time takes the longest because you have to copy everything but after that whenever I offload files from my computer to my external I just do the same for my second external. A RAID does something similar by creating redundant backups but my way is less expensive although it does require you to do the work yourself in doing a redundant backup.

Another solution (when prices come down) is to use a Blue Ray burner. Right now it's just too expensive to invest in one plus the cost of the media. The least expensive way for storage is still on an hard drive. Maybe when the cost of large SSD drives come down in price that will be the best.

And BTW, I agree with Nick... I have floppies and CDs that are real old (especially the floppies) which work fine. It's usually the drive that wears out first.

Regards.