Consolidating external harddrives

Hey guys,

I have several USB harddrives and I've had enough of shuffling files around on external disks.

I would like to have just a single volume and preferably have an automatic backup of that as well.

My first thought was to get a Drobo and shove a few of these drives into that, but I wanted to get some other opinions first. A colleague has suggested buying a Synology NAS and plugging a large external drive into that for backup purposes.

My uses for external drives are:
- Storing media (Large Aperture libraries, movies etc.)
- Backing up (I have Time machine and full disk backup partitions on two separate drives)

I'm thinking Drobo would give me the redundancy I'm after with minimal fuss - a NAS solution would help consolidate 2 drives and have other benefit, but doesn't offer the same level of redundancy.

Any other thoughts?
Cheers!

I have been looking at one of these .... still in doubt however.

QNAP Systems, Inc. - Quality Network Appliance Provider

Cheers ... McBie

Aptmunich...how much storage capacity are you thinking?...what sort of number do you have in mind?

- Nick

I currently have about 3TB in external storage connected, of which I probably use about 1.5TB (including backups etc.)

I'd like to have about 4TB I suppose, but more importantly some of the media I currently have isn't backed up, so having a built-in backup (Raid 5 style) would be ideal.

Tough decisions. I was down to either a Drobo or a QNAP when I was looking a few months ago. Just couldn't put the cash together for the ones I wanted - or should say I couldn't bring myself to spend that much for them and ended up going with a use your own drives Newertech RAID 1 quad interface from OWC instead. Good luck with the decision making.

Update: I ended up going with a Synology DS411 Diskstation. Loving it so far: I've added all my media drives to it and am only keeping 1 external drive for an extra back up of really important stuff in case of some sort of RAID catastrophe.

But the interface is really nice!