LarryCast.com

I’m a pack rat, I tend to keep everything “just in case” I might need it. Who knows when I might need that Compaq “dogbone” power interlock defeating tool for an ancient ProLiant tower - it could happen!

So being genetically predisposed to saving everything, enter the digital age. I have a Canon original digital Rebel SLR, 6 megapixels per photo, approximately 25GB of iPhoto content. I have a Canon Elura MiniDV camcorder, 12GB per hour of filming. I have the ultra cool TVMiniHD tuner gizmo for my laptop, 8GB per hour of tv recorded. I have my iTunes library chock full of stuff (my 60GB video iPod is 50GB full). You get the picture where I’m headed with this.

I just checked my EyeTV Archive folder - 138GB of tv shows and I’m recording a NOVA program about the everglades while I type this. My largest iMovieHD (as of yet unstarted/unfinished) project, 55GB. What to do with all the storage becomes a major problem.

I bought a 400GB external firewire Maxtor drive from Costco a few weeks ago that is now my “go everywhere” drive that accompanies my laptop. It allows me the flexibility to do some cool things moving content between machines as well as actually being faster than my internal drive in the laptop.

This newest external drive is in addition to my existing 400GB Seagate external and my older 120GB external Maxtor. Oh, and that 100GB 7200 rpm drive that used to be in my little Acer tablet is now in a mini USB external chassis. So that’s a terabyte of external personal storage not counting the internal drives of the various computers I have.

Did I mention we also have two TiVo DVRs? I pull content off of them and after cleaning the show, I watch it on my laptop using VLC. That’s about 1GB per hour of tv.
Let’s not forget I use Parallels to run Windows XP and I’ve been playing with Windows Vista as well, that’s 20GB of virtual hard drive space. Oh and VMware Fusion beta 2 just came out, I’m also playing with Vista on it as well, another 20GB of storage needed.

I’ve mentioned that I have a MacBook Pro that I take everywhere (as well as a stationary older G4 mini at home) and have the rocket Mac Pro at work. So having a 400GB external drive lets me build my tools and toys and since I’m in a homogeneous Mac environment, I can move that drive between all the various machines copying data to and fro as I need. Or I can do some cool stuff in Parallels and have access to it on the laptop or the desktop at work depending on what I need when. And it is really handy having that monster Mac Pro when I need to convert a 13GB HDTV show for viewing on my iPod. This all becomes possible having the big external firewire drive as the common denominator between the machines.

I used to try doing that with a fat32 formatted drive until I bumped into the 4GB max file size limit and I never felt that comfy about buying a Mac compatible utility for my Windows machine because one slip and all my irreplaceable content is gone.

Speaking of which, did I mention I have to keep two copies of everything just in case one of the drives fails?

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2007 at 8:34 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.