OK, so the geek met the road on this one.
As part of my almost paranoid take on preserving my images, I put a 750GB drive in the PowerMac last week, right? Well, I’ve taken paranoid to a whole new level.
I’ve been thinking about an external drive to hang off the Quad to use as a near realtime backup device. I’d been looking at the Seagate 750GB externals, but wasn’t thrilled — they weren’t Firewire 800, so the massive amount of data I move around sometimes could be troubling. So I noticed on BestBuy’s site a new drive from WD — the Western Digital My Book Premium Edition II (WDG2T10000) — that was 1TB, RAID, user serviceable and USB/Firewire400/Firewire800. Ohmigosh!
Well, after watching for it to show up at any BB store in the area, it finally showed last Saturday, and I dashed up the road to get it, 12% off coupon in hand. As it ends up, they were merely in transit, and wouldn’t arrive for several more days. However, the guy in the computer department said they could order it, use my coupon, and deliver it directly to the house for no additional charge. I couldn’t pass that up!
Now, I fully expected to hear that this drive was a pipe dream someplace. I mean, I couldn’t find hardly any data on the thing anywhere on the web, but with each passing day, there seemed to be a little more data.
And then it happened: on Monday, I got a tracking number!
Last night, the thing came in, and I was like a kid at Christmas. I opened the box, tried my best to read the instructions to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid that would cost me precious backup time, and plugged it all in.
And it just worked. Just like it’s supposed to.
I converted it from NTFS (default format) to an Apple-centric format, left it in RAID 0 — since it’s the backup to the main drive, there’s no need for RAID 1 and redundancy of redundancy — and started copying files.
In nine hours, rsync had put about 560GB across the FW800 port, and onto the little drive that could. Wow. Half a terabyte in that time! I mean, it’s not like the storage at work, but it’s pretty doggone cool for me! Great thing is that I can add more of the units, change the drives to bigger ones, or do whatever it takes to handle my storage needs. This was a cool, cool addition to my office!
And, at around 46 cents/GB, I think I can handle it! 🙂