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Mac Mini HTS which ext HD?

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wicked23

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 20, 2009
56
0
Houston
I have searched this topic and I know it has been cover a hundred times but I am now so confused on which type of external hard drives I should purchase for my Mac Mini which will be connected to my HTS. I plan on ripping my extensive DVD collection and storing them on a 2T (minimum) external hard drive. I will also have probably a 2T external hard drive for backing up my laptops and mini also. I can not decide which type of hard drive system I should go with and what set up makes the most sense. I will connect my hard drives via FW800 or eSATA.

Also for those of you that store your DVD collection on hard drives how do you back up that hard drive?

What do you guys suggest?
 
wicked23 said:
Also for those of you that store your DVD collection on hard drives how do you back up that hard drive?

What do you guys suggest?
Click to expand...
I have had great success with drives from Other World Computing (OWC)

I keep my movies, TV shows and some of my music library on this, which comes in sizes up to 3TB:
OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro™
owcmeaqmaphero350.jpg


I use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup this drive to an identical drive, which I keep offsite.
 
The Mac mini does not have an esata port but does have FireWire 800, thunderbolt, gigabit Ethernet and USB ports so there is quite a selection of direct and nas storage options available.

I like the Lacie 2 big quadra raid drive that I've been using for several years trouble free. It has several interfaces and offers twin hot swappable drives. It's available in 2, 4 and 6 tb versions. OWC also makes excellent products.
 
Ok I think I know what I want. I want 2T for movies, 2T to backup my movies, and 2T (partitioned) to backup my macbook, macbook pro, and mac mini. So would a 6T Lacie 2 big quadra raid drive partitioned into 3 2T sections work? Does this all sound reasonable or does anyone have a cheaper or better idea?
 
It sounds like you don't plan to store anything unique on your external drive. If that's really the case and you allready have everything elsewhere (on CDs or DVDs or other machines) than you wouldn't absolutely need any data redundancy on the drive. Depending on the volume of data though there is a time investment ripping or copying or backing up you would have to expend again in the event of a failed drive.

A twin drive with data reduncency cuts capacity in half and one drive mirrors another (raid 1). With four drive units you can use a different raid flavor (5) that only costs about 25% of you capacity rather than 50 used by twin units.

So if you don't need data reduncency most of the twin disk units that hold two 3tb drives will do you. If you need or want data redundancy for 6tb you are best off with a four drive unit with four 2tb disks which with raid 5 should get you between 5 and 6tb capacity that allows for a single drive failure without any data loss.

I can't speak for the Seagate drives you mentioned but if the drives implement it you could daisy chain three drives.
 
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Go get yourself a Synology DS 1511+ and fill em up with 3 or 4TB drives as your needs grow. You'll have the added benefit of RAID in case any one of your drives fail. :D
 
Sorry I am having a hard time grasping the RAID concept. So if I purchased a
Mercury Elite Pro Performance 7200RPM RAID 4T 2x2T and I set them up for RAID 1 and put all my media data on one 2T hardrive the other 2T would mirror the first hard drive. If one hard drive failed the other would still have all my media files? I dont want to use the hard drives to back up my mini just to back each other up. I am going to use the hard drives to store movies and music only. Thx
 
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