Beefing up my home storage

March 24th, 2009 | by Tim Wilson |

I’ll try not to be too nostalgic here, but I can’t help mentioning that my first PC, a 12-MHz 286 I bought in college, was equipped with a spacious 32-MB hard drive. I could fill that drive today with just a few photos from my Canon G9. In contrast, the iMac I have a home has a 750-GB drive. That’s a mere 23,000× increase in capacity.

I have a few hundred CDs at home, and I wanted to to make sure I had them available on my home network. Rather than encode them in a lossy format like MP3 or AAC, I decided to use Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) format. Using Apple Lossless produces only modest compression of about 50%, but it retains full audio fidelity. I only have a couple dozen DVDs, but thanks to Handbrake I can make digital copies of those too, and each weighs in at about 1.5 GB. In an era of cheap disk storage it seems like a good compromise.

The iMac disk eventually got full enough that I couldn’t back it up to my 500-GB external drive anymore. After keeping my eye on them for over a year, I decided to upgrade to a Drobo and loaded it up with three 1-TB hard drives. The result is a cool 1.8-TB of redundant storage.

Loading the Drobo

The most attractive aspect of the Drobo is that it’s practically infinitely expandable. As larger drives become available you simply pop out one of your existing drives and replace it with a larger one. The Drobo automatically arranges all of the data and spans to the new drive to maintain the redundancy. I didn’t need all four drives to get started, so I just put the 1-TB drives in three of the bays.

iMac with Drobo

I plugged the Drobo into the iMac using the Firewire 800 port for maximum copy speed. Even with the fast interface it took several hours to move a few hundred gigs of data to the Drobo.

AEBS and Drobo

The final step was moving the Drobo to my hall closet and plugging it in to the USB port on my Airport Extreme Basestation. This makes the Drobo available on my network so that any machine in the house can access the media or backup files to it. So far so good, but I have to admit that that the backup speed is only mediocre even over a Gig ethernet wired network. I suspect the so-so performance has a lot to do with the relatively slow USB 2.0 interface. It’s plenty fast to stream media for Boxee on the iMac though, and since I run the backups over night, the speed doesn’t really matter.

Stay tuned for a description of how I’m using my old MyBook external drive to store encrypted data off-site.

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  1. 7 Responses to “Beefing up my home storage”

  2. By Dan Geiser on Mar 28, 2009 | Reply

    Awesome. I’ve been thinking about getting one of these. What sort of 1 TB hard drives did you use?

  3. By Tim Wilson on Mar 28, 2009 | Reply

    Dan,

    I bought the Western Digital Caviar Green drives (model #WD10EADS). You don’t really need to buy particularly fast drives for a Drobo. I got the “green” drives because they run quiet and use less power. I may have the Drobo next to my TV some day so I wanted it to be as quiet as possible.

  4. By Tom Hoffman on Jul 13, 2009 | Reply

    Tim,

    This still working? I’m considering recommending it to my sister to back up all her artwork.

  5. By Tim Wilson on Jul 13, 2009 | Reply

    Hey Tom, everything works well. The only problem is that the Drobo can have trouble if it’s unexpectedly powered down. I had to run Disk Warrior on it at one point after several power outages at our house. I didn’t have any data loss, but I’m sure it would be happier if it were running on a UPS. I’m thinking of getting a Mac Mini as a home theater PC, and I would move the Drobo to that instead of the Airport Extreme Base Station that it’s connected to now. It might even be a little faster then since the AEBS doesn’t have enough horsepower to push much data at Firewire 800 speeds.

  6. By Dan T on Nov 11, 2009 | Reply

    FreeNAS – Very cool for AFP

  7. By Todd Alan on Nov 12, 2009 | Reply

    Tim-

    Great setup! If you’re readers are looking for alternative storage options they could always look to the cloud with services like dropbox.com.

  8. By Storage Suggestions on Feb 6, 2010 | Reply

    Looking for extra storage space? Just look up. The ceiling is the most overlooked storage area in the garage. There are store bought kits that can turn wasted space into useful garage storage, or a few sheets of plywood laid across the ceiling beams will work just as well.

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