More storage, Igor!

The trouble with desktop video is this: one hour of DV footage is a little over 13Gb of data. Compounding this peril is that, in my experience, captured video sits around for a few weeks or months before one has the time and inclination to do something with it. Which adds up to a curious repeating computing experience: whereas, ten years ago, one could never find a floppy disk with a spare 50 Kb on it, today one can never find a hard drive with a spare 50Gb.

Last night I ripped apart my chum Mike’s stricken iMac and tore out the brand-new 80Gb drive I’d fitted in a last-ditch effort to make it believe it actually had a boot device. Said Seagate is now crammed into a cheap and cheerful (and surprisingly elegant) case from the local bucket PC shop, who seemed mildly offended that they had Mac-compatible FireWire peripherals on their shelves. It’s been on all night copying files from my PC (which seems to run more and more slowly each day), and astonishingly hasn’t burst into flames yet, which round these part constitutes ‘production-ready.’

So now my Mac has 140Gb storage internally, and up to about another 170Gb externally, if I turn everything on. So, of course, I’ve filled another 30Gb by capturing footage from Steve and Amanda’s wedding, and now all my drives are full again.

Drat.

1 thought on “More storage, Igor!”

  1. I’ve been chatting with friends about this problem. In the states, storage is about $1 / gig, but firewire cases are $50 each, more or less, and won’t do anything besides present as a bunch of little drives.
    I think the answer is probably a commodity PC case with 12 drive bays, IP over firewire, and voila – firewire-fast Network Attatched Storage.
    Of course, does any freely available OS do firewire over IP? I don’t think so. But it’ll come. That way, the commodity PC can do the legwork of using NFS or some such horror to make everything look like a single big drive which just gets bigger every time you plug in a new box.
    Or something like that 🙂

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