massive storage solutions

now that i am starting to fiddle with video, i’m starting to realize that i really need massive amounts of hard drive space for all of this video editing and storage.

after doing some research, i have come to a couple of conclusions. first off, let me describe my current world. the motherboard i have comes with 4 internal SATA ports and 1 eSATA port. this would seem like more ports than anyone would need unless you are crazy like me.

currently, i have a boot drive and a DVD drive taking up 2 of the internal SATA ports leaving me with two ports internally. i will probably end up getting two more internal drives and stripe them for storage. that really only affords me 4TB of storage in system.

in my network, i have a 3TB NAS and a 2TB NAS currently being used as slow storage. the primary NAS rsyncs with the secondary one so that i have some redundancy. i’m not sure if this is enough storage now that video is being introduced into the mix. with my images it was more than enough space.

i’ve been reading about eSATA enclosures and it looks like enclosures that use port multipliers allow multiple drives per enclosure at the expense of performance. maybe this is ok for permanent storage, but not good enough to be a working disk.

the other option is to get an enclosure that has multiple eSATA ports, one for each drive. that would work except i don’t have many eSATA ports available, which means that i would need to find an eSATA add-on card that works in my system. i think i will deal with that when that day comes.

i’m going to see how long the 2x2TB drives will last me for. i was hoping to do a windows install on one of those drives too, so that’ll take some space away from my storage.

EDIT: just opened the case and saw that the machine has 6 internal SATA ports. maybe i can just cram a bunch of drives into this machine after all.

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