Fixing my hard drive space issues by buying more hard drive space – 15TB more storage

So, I explained I’ve run into some issues with my files and how they are scattered everywhere and I can’t make sense out of anything. Well, in order to get myself out of the corner I’ve painted myself into, I had to buy more hard drive space. Yes, indeed, in order to fix the fact that I have too much hard drive space I had to buy more hard drive space. To that end I bought 3 5TB Seagate external hard drives which adds hefty 15TB of additional space to my machine. This gives me somewhere in the neighborhood of 50TB on a single machine. Gadzooks!

Here is how I plan to attack the problem. I’m going to copy all my TV Shows, which constitutes around 3.5TB across 2 drives to one of the new drives. This will put them all in one place so I can see what I’ve got. Next, I will copy all of the movies I’ve ripped from DVD collection to the second drive. This too is around 3TB of space across 2 separate drives. Next, my entire software collection will be moved to one of the free 3TB drives. I will then move my eBooks, Audiobooks, MP3 music collection, concert DVDs and all my documents to the other free drive. In case you think an eBook collection is trivial, I have 30GB in books, manuals and documents and it grows significantly each year.

My goal is to silo these drives with each drive holding a specific type of content. I will have 1 for TV Shows, 1 for Movies, 1 for Music, 1 for Documents, etc.

Another massive part of this project is to rename all the files and folders into something meaningful, to organize the folders so they actually represents what inside them and to delete all the duplicate files I have scattered around the place. For example, I need to organize the books into computer related books such as Exchange, Windows, Sharepoint, Ubuntu, etc as well as Fiction, Non-fiction, Biographies, Cookbooks, Travel, etc.

I need to do the same for the movies, such as ISO images in one place, MP4s in another, Concerts, Tutorials, etc.

By my guess I will need to move around 10-15TB just to get things started. The 3rd 5TB drive will be used as a temp drive to store everything as it gets moved from one place to another. When all is said and done I would like for it to be blank again and standing by for whatever I need.

If you’ve ever worked with volume of data, you know that it can take hours to move 100GB of data around. It going to take days to get all these files moved and settled in their new home. This will be a pretty big undertaking and I better get it right or I’ll have to start over again.

And I just learned that Seagate announced the shipment of an 8TB drive. Chances are we’ll start to see them within a month or so, but who knows how much they cost. The 5TB has a pretty decent price point right now and when the 8TB drops in price (perhaps Christmas) I will be all over a pair of those.