Laptop storage and workflow

Hi,

Okay heres the run down. I don t spend much time at home so the only computer I have is a MacBook Pro, which is fine in that is does what I require of it. Storage however is another issue, my internal hard drive is only 250gb and which my photo library being over 100gb I am starting to have storage issues.

What I have been thinking about doing is moving my entire achieve to a 2.5¨ firewire external drive, which should have the speed and portability to make it usable. Whilst I do back ups to 3.5'' external drive when I get home, it could be anything between 6 to 9 months before I get home again, so effectively i want a robust and redundant storage solution.

So I was thinking that I could RAID 1 the two 2.5'' hard drives giving me reasonable speed and redundancy, but daisy chaining the drives together I am not sure of the impact on transfer rates.

I am sure their are heaps of you guys that have had similar problems and solutions, I d be grateful of your input.

Thanks

Erol

Not sure which MacBook Pro you have (with the expressCard slot or not), but if it is one with the slot, getting a eSATA card and small eSATA enclosures is something I like to use due to the speed. Things like OWC enclosure. Note some things may require power/USB connector to power based on the size of the drive. Also having other connections (FW800 and USB) is something I also like to have different ways to access the drives. Though for photos, FW800 is usually fine.

I also have a card reader/viewer. (Now have two of them in fact.) What I usually to is read the card in, then make copies to a drive and the computer (space permitting). I am not sure I would go the RAID 1 route though and usually use SuperDuper or similar app to duplicate to another hard drive. Since it is mirroring if a file gets corrupt in RAID 1 (or you delete one) then it is lost. Don't get me wrong, I do have RAID 1s at home for somethings as part of the system, but for photos while traveling, I would not go that route.

I do have a tendency to probably bring a bit too much on the computer side of things (had one trip where I did not have what I needed, so probably overreacting) and I also shoot video, but I will usually bring at least 3 2.5" drives with me for longer trips, including one that has a partition for a full system restore and all utilities (Diskwarrior, etc.) Most of the time you will not need it, but when you do you will be thankful. Big time.

If I am doing a one week quick trip I do drop things down, but for longer trips I bring more. If you think you need one FW800 cable, bring two, etc. Some things will be dictated by where you are going. For instance if I go to California I am not as concerned of being short on something, can always go to a Best Buy or something and grab what I need. But at some places it is alot more difficult to get things you will need, and often the annoyance of carrying a bit more is more than offset by having it when you need it.

EDIT TO ADD: On the small units you can often save a bit of money by buying bare drives and putting them into enclosures you purchase. Also if your library is 100 Gigs, you may want to consider getting a drive just to back up and put into a safe deposit box or other safe place....

Thanks Drew, eSata is something I never really considered, back given that I can get a card for the macbook, def something I ll think about.

I ll also look into SuperDuper. Am I right in thinking that it gives the same funcunality as CarbonClone?

Cheers e

Thanks Drew, eSata is something I never really considered, back given that I can get a card for the macbook, def something I ll think about.

 

I ll also look into SuperDuper. Am I right in thinking that it gives the same funcunality as CarbonClone?

 

 

Cheers e

Pretty similar (CCC and SD) and there are some other programs out there and all basically do the trick. I think I have four different programs that I have gotten over time, seems like each on does something a bit different or I somehow prefer more.

Also something else to consider if you are getting cards, a FW800 card also. (Again alot depends of what you want to carry etc.), but having different drives to allocate to programs can help tweak with speed. For instance, on the video side of things, I will hook up a couple of drives (and these will be different busses), one for the media and one for scratch disc to get them off the laptop. Not sure which programs you use, but you may be able to boost performace a tad in some (though sometimes it may not be noticiable enough to be worth the hassle.)

Forget about using raid on external drives. That is a recipe for disaster. Raid1 breaks whenever one of the disks is missing, which will be every single time you disconnect one of the drives before the other.

What you could consider is removing your internal DVD drive and replacing it with a 2.5" 500GB hard drive. You can check out how that works here: http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/. If you really need a DVD drive, you could bring an external slim DVD drive.

I have that setup (and so does Eric, and Tony Wu) and it works great.

So, what I have is this:

- internal boot disk

- internal 500GB data disk

- external boot disk (a copy of my internal boot disk)

- external data disk (a copy of my internal data disk)

You can skip the external boot disk, but you'll regret it some day.

Forget about using raid on external drives. That is a recipe for disaster. Raid1 breaks whenever one of the disks is missing, which will be every single time you disconnect one of the drives before the other.

 

What you could consider is removing your internal DVD drive and replacing it with a 2.5" 500GB hard drive. You can check out how that works here: http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/. If you really need a DVD drive, you could bring an external slim DVD drive.

 

I have that setup (and so does Eric, and Tony Wu) and it works great.

 

So, what I have is this:

 

- internal boot disk

- internal 500GB data disk

- external boot disk (a copy of my internal boot disk)

- external data disk (a copy of my internal data disk)

 

You can skip the external boot disk, but you'll regret it some day.

Cor,

How do you synch the internal discs with the external discs to keep them current?

There's all kinds of programs that do that. I use ChronoSync. It can synchronize bootable drives.

There's all kinds of programs that do that. I use ChronoSync. It can synchronize bootable drives.

Thanks,

I've given up on Time Machine.

So, what I have is this:

- internal boot disk

- internal 500GB data disk

- external boot disk (a copy of my internal boot disk)

- external data disk (a copy of my internal data disk)

You can skip the external boot disk, but you'll regret it some day.

That sounds like quiet compact solution in many respects, but I am not sure I win that much.

I have to carry 3 items 1 boot harddrive, 1 data hard drive and 1 optical drive.

Given that I ll only need 200gb of achieve space for the near future I can retain my optical drive internally and get 2 x 500gb hard drives that are clones with the addition of having a boot partition on one of them.

Nice idea though.

I havent used an optical drive in years, so i got rid of last centuries technology in my machine

I've got a RAID 0 in my MacBook Pro. I posted a bunch of benchmarks here:

http://echeng.com/journal/2009/04/18/raid-...pro-17-unibody/

Here's a comparison of sequential reads when compared to having only 1 SSD:

Random reads and writes will give you an indication of real-world use, though (click through to see those graphs).

I second Cor's idea of always having an external boot disk. My two SSDs add up to 320GB in one volume, so I SuperDuper! it over to an external 320GB drive as backup. I use SuperDuper! because it is smart about OS-specific stuff like FileVault encryption. ChronoSync is probably fine for bootable backups if you don't use FileVault.

I also carry a second 500GB drive as secondary backup, and a USB stick with a bootable virgin install of Mac OS X on it with rescue tools installed (DiskUtil, DiskWarrior and Data Rescue being the main tools). I use ChronoSync to synchronize specific directories to my secondary backup. Before I travel, I copy my selects onto an encrypted 32GB USB stick and put it in my pocket.

People say stripes fail a lot, but striped SSDs are probably more reliable than even a single spinning drive.

I have a LG Slim DVD writer that I sometimes travel with. It is a little more expensive, but it's the only one I could find that is single USB powered.

Note that if you want to boot from DVD, you will have to get an enclosure for your SuperDrive. Third-party DVD drives aren't bootable on the Mac (unless that has changed in the last year).

Finally, here are some numbers from having striped spinning disks (which I did back in 2007):

http://echeng.com/journal/2007/04/26/320gb...-0-macbook-pro/

Not sure which MacBook Pro you have (with the expressCard slot or not), but if it is one with the slot, getting a eSATA card and small eSATA enclosures is something I like to use due to the speed. Things like OWC enclosure. Note some things may require power/USB connector to power based on the size of the drive. Also having other connections (FW800 and USB) is something I also like to have different ways to access the drives. Though for photos, FW800 is usually fine.

I think eSATA is going to be dead for mobile when USB 3.0 becomes mainstream. They seriously screwed up by not including power in the eSATA spec to begin with, and it's probably too late to recover.

I think eSATA is going to be dead for mobile when USB 3.0 becomes mainstream. They seriously screwed up by not including power in the eSATA spec to begin with, and it's probably too late to recover.

Very well could be and there was a time when places like OWC had dropped the 2.5 enclosures for eSATA drives, I had bought one and then went to get another and they were no longer around for quite awhile. Glad they bought them back though if USB 3.0 performs as well as they say it should, yeah it will probably be gone other than for the computers that can take advantage of eSATA but not USB 3.0

BTW, I really like the RAID 0 SSD concept and remember when you posted that before. I am just waiting for the prices to drop a bit more before I change over to SSD on the laptops...

Eric, with the prelim tests, it seems USB 3.0 isn't going to be as fast as hoped for:

http://blogs.pcmag.com/miller/2010/02/usb_..._real_world.php

Still, finally to have something fast with one wire to rule them all!

I go a different route with on the road backup. I have 3 500GB external drives, one setup by the Nextodi Extreme, which has a built-in card reader and battery. It downloads all files on the card in separate dated folders, and a back up of that on a generic eSATA/USB external drive done via the computer. I don't like the Nextodi filing system but it's a lot easier and faster (40-50MB/s) to download and then backup to the 2nd and 3rd drive via eSATA. I can leave the computer to do the backup while I'm diving, so it'll be done by the end of the day. I don't like fussing over the computer after a dive, other than backup.

Thanks for the input guys that gives me a lot to think about.

Having the 2 x internal RAID drives does look like a very nice system, with impressive performance.

At this stage, however, I have a pretty stripped down lifestyle and the only CD/DVD player I own is in my MBP, so regardless of whether it is cut edge technology or not, it does get a fair amount of use. Spending months at sea as I do watching a DVD is nice wind down in bad weather.

So for that reason I will keep the internal optical drive, however if my circumstances change and the price of SSDs comes down some, this solution is something I think I will return to in the future.

Also keep a USB stick with a virgin bootable OSX is a very good idea, in that it is cheap and portable. Thanks I ll def be employing that.

So weighing up all the pro and cons I think I ll look at 2 x 500gb externals connecting via eSata or FW and use SuperDuper to manage them.

Aside from the comments that Eric had about the lack of power in the ESata config, are there any other downside to eSata. I had a quick search on the net and there seemed to be a lot of people having trouble with the eSata cards, either getting transfer rate more akin to FW800 and/or having the eSata card causing systems crashes.

The impression I got was that most of these issue where resolved with the release of Leopard and subsequently Snow Leopard. Are there still any out standing issues with eSata?

Thanks again.

I keep a bootable install DVD around as well, but instead of on a thumbstick i have it on an 8GB partition on my external boot disk copy. My internal SSD is 250GB, and I have a 500GB external copy for it, so I have 250GB left for other things, like a few dozen DVDs