Here is my drive cluster
He who dies with the most hard drives win. So here it is, my hard drive cluster. This is a series of external drives by Seagate and Western Digital, including my new 4TB drive by Seagate. For one particular machine it’s a total of 11 external drives and 2 internal drives all totaling 23TB of hard drive space. There is a secondary machine with an additional 6GB of space inside of it. I bought 2x3TB Seagate Barracudas for that machine. If you add up all the drives, it’s 30TB.
So why do I need all that space? I think the better question is, why not? All these drives constitute a massive media collection including thousands of photos from my cameras, my entire DVD collection in ISO and MP4 format, all my music in MP3 format, hundreds of gigs worth of cycling videos and tours, (Tour de France, Tour Down Under, Paris-Nice, etc) hundreds of gigs worth of Virtual Machines for VirtualBox (Windows 2008 R2, Exchange 2010, Windows 2003 Web Edition) and a couple of drives used as backups.
Yeah, it’s a lot of hard drive space, but in this crazy mixed up digital world of ours, a few terabytes doesn’t last as long as it used to.
Hi! Verry funny blog with “go to the point” on many post! I spent good time reading some of your post.
Regarding this one about NAS, “many NAS” in fact, I would be curious to see a screenshot of what it looks like in file explorer for example showing all of them. Do you map all of them to a drive letter? Do you reach them via long unc path each time? NET USE… should see a two pages long series of paths! 🙂
While I still have those drives, the drive cluster looks nothing like that now. Almost all of my external drives have had the cases removed and they have been installed into a series of MediaSonic 8 Bay Drive Enclosures.
I have 2x 8 bay enclosures, along with 3x 4 bay drive enclosures.
The enclosures are now connected to a Mac Pro rather than a Windows machine.
The drives are connected through a USB 3 connection and appear as volumes.
Each drive has been named to contain the number of the enclosure, the slot it’s in and it’s size, such as: E3D5-TV Shows (8TB), E1D2-Photos (3TB). They are then cataloged in NeoFinder so I actually know what the heck is on them. I don’t have the enclosures on all the time.
That is 28 drives connected to the Mac, with another 8 drives I still need to connect. I will use another 8 bay enclosure for that set.