Jan
18

12 Connected Drives

25 Comments

In the past five years of doing GeekBrief.TV, a lot of data organization has fallen by the wayside in favor of saving time because it always felt like we were going, going, going and with just the two of us doing everything, some things just didn’t get done properly.

Over the weekend, I decided to dig in to the mess and reorganize ALL my data!! I wanted to make it as easy as possible, so I hooked up all 12 drives at once. Yep, that’s right….12 drives at…the…same…time!

I expect I’ll get some questions about what kind of drives I have in this stack, so here’s a list, from left to right, top to bottom:

  • WD MyBook
  • LaCie
  • G-Drive
  • G-Drive Mini (highly recommend these drives!)
  • LaCie Rugged
  • Drobo Firewire
  • Drobo USB
  • Drobo Pro
  • G-Drive Mini (2)
  • Acomdata (very old!)
  • Drobo USB

Posted in Blog
25 Comments Posted by Cali Lewis

25 Responses to "12 Connected Drives"

  • Chris says:
    January 18, 2010 at 7:59 pm

    At least I’m not the only person who is disorganized. What is the total GB or TB for your setup? How many USB hubs are you using to connect these guys, and what does Finder look like when it’s all plugged in?

    Thanks again for making GeekBrief!
    Cheers!

  • George Starcher says:
    January 18, 2010 at 8:00 pm

    Just don’t let @victorcajiao see that stack. It might renew his drive addiction to keep up.

  • Brendan says:
    January 18, 2010 at 8:01 pm

    So out of all of those drives/arrrays which is your favorite?

  • Linh says:
    January 18, 2010 at 8:02 pm

    Just streamline it all into a couple more drobo pro’s… and I’ll take one of your drobo’s off your hands for you =)

  • Greg Morgan says:
    January 18, 2010 at 8:03 pm

    Good googly moogly! I thought I was bad with 4 external drives and 2 drives on my server.

    Out of curiosity, how are you planning on keeping track of all that archived footage?

  • Gary / GanderCo says:
    January 18, 2010 at 8:04 pm

    DANG! I thought I was bad coz I thought I might need more than one!

    Love your show Cali!

    Gary Anderson II
    aka- @GanderCo

  • RobertJ says:
    January 18, 2010 at 8:06 pm

    What a wimp, I’ve got three/for times that many external drives, and that doesn’t count the bare drives I have.

  • jimmylittle says:
    January 18, 2010 at 8:31 pm

    man, I thought I was bad. I have a stack of 11 Seagate FreeAgent Go’s next to my iMac… Can only hook 7 up at a time, though!

  • rgphoto70 says:
    January 18, 2010 at 8:50 pm

    Did you take this with a 5D2?

  • Trace says:
    January 18, 2010 at 9:47 pm

    Since it is just the two of you, why don’t you hire me to help you out?

  • Victor Cajiao says:
    January 18, 2010 at 10:01 pm

    I think I have a stack just like that or near it. My name is Victor and I have a storage problem. :)

  • Jay Barcelo says:
    January 18, 2010 at 10:49 pm

    You need at lest 2 more DroboElites connected to dual 1Gbit network to retire the old Drobo USB’s and some of the single drives. Good Setup!.

  • Sinjin says:
    January 19, 2010 at 2:49 am

    Nice pile o’ bytes. I only use Firewire, since USB sucks so much, and I just got a 3-way hub (never thought I’d need one, but the WD MyBook’s port #2 died!) which looks like a Flux Capacitor.

  • Andy Higgins says:
    January 19, 2010 at 3:37 am

    You can definitely get a GeekBrief ‘special’ show out of this. As others have already asked:

    Which is your favourite drive and why?
    Which is your least favourite and why?
    How did you connect them up?
    How many TB’s are there in total?
    Show some footage of Finder with them all connected
    Is the plan to consolidate, buy more Drobo Pro’s and get rid of the rest?
    etc

  • palorx says:
    January 19, 2010 at 2:02 pm

    As Andy Higgins said, either a pecial show, or a portion of a show would be an interesting follow up to this.

  • Dave says:
    January 20, 2010 at 8:25 am

    Connecting all the drives at once is fun for moving data but connected drives can be wiped out by a virus in one night, no matter how careful you think you are.

    Consider archiving to detached media. Perhaps Carbonite would partner/advertise with you.

  • Daynah says:
    January 25, 2010 at 3:09 am

    The title of this post just made me burst into song! :)

    On the first month of 2010, my geekbrief gal gave to me,

    12 connected drives….
    11 and 1 Twitter tips
    10 geeky episodes
    9 HD vidoes
    8 podcasting tips
    7 shows about CES
    6 show notes links
    5 geeky blogs!
    4 iphone app reviews
    3 Apple rumors news
    2 toys for Loki
    and 1 amazing podcast!

  • Cali Lewis says:
    January 25, 2010 at 8:37 am

    Haha! That was awesome, Daynah! :)

  • Jim Huffman says:
    January 25, 2010 at 10:42 pm

    Drobo trivia I just learned that MIGHT impact performance. Apparently with the new Drobo Pro and Drobo S, you can disable or extend the hard drive spin down for inactivity. But with earlier versions you can’t. So, if you get 15 minutes of non use on the older models (which with your popularity probably never happens), then all 4 hard drives spin down. Then, if a request is made on the channel where they are connected, you get the spinning color wheel until they spin back up. The delay, for me was too annoying – now I use it only for backup….

  • John says:
    February 17, 2010 at 9:54 pm

    Time to get a backup raid. Dump all your data into that one box and recycle the drives for new content!

  • Reanna Bates says:
    April 5, 2010 at 4:28 pm

    Interesting insight, amazed I never thought of that by myself

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  • Reid Mccotter says:
    July 25, 2010 at 2:03 am

    @Michael Can you elaborate on your point?

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