External Drives...

[sith_killer_99]

Well, I am in the process of consolidating and organizing my external hard drives....

I own the following drives

Seagate Freeagent 750GB
My Book 1 TB
My Book 500 GB
My Book 500 GB

Passport 160 GB
Passport 250 GB
Passport 250 GB
Passport 360 GB

The plan is:

Passport (250 GB) iTunes library
Passport (160 GB) misc. programs, docs, pics, etc.
Passport (360 GB) drive back up image (mine)
Passport (250 GB) empty

Seagate (750 GB) Media (TV show downloads, movies, etc.)
My Book (1 TB) personal storage
My Book (500 GB) iTunes libraries (mine and wife) back up plus all other music
My Book (500 GB) drive image back up (wife and daughter)

Also my wife has a 1 TB My Book she uses for her personal stuff.

Lots of storage in the house, close to 5 TB!:crazed:

Does anyone else have tons of hard drives sitting around? Is anyone using an NAS storage device?

[JediTricks]

Dang, you have a ton of externals! How full are all those drives?

I have 1 Seagate Freeagent 750gb which I barely ever use, I just got a new computer with a 500gb harddrive and I put a new 320gb drive in my laptop, so I don't need a lot of extra space.

[sith_killer_99]

Most of 'em were full, I ripped a lot of movies to hard drives to watch when I was in Afghanistan. I cleared out more than 1 TB of data recently, since I have all of those movies on DVD here at the house.

I plan to buy a home server to use for backing up all of our drives (we have 3 PC's in the house). I will also use it for streaming media across the network, we have a lot of TV shows, movies, funny videos, etc. that we have sort of collected over the years.

We also have a lot of other digital media, my wife does a lot of graphics work for websites, so she needs a lot of space as well.

Also the Passports are nice because we all use laptops, and they can be used for holding iTunes libraries, I have a LOT of iTunes videos.

[JediTricks]

Dang, you must rip movies at a very high bitrate to fill up nearly 4 terabytes. Or you have a ton of films. :p

Be careful about centralizing them on a server, if they don't shut down after immediate use, they will quickly burn out and trap your data.