I can't stop growing... well digitally but need help now

Hi Guys

I am at a crossroads concerning the storage of my media files from FCPX.. Somehow I have 2 x 1 TB WD my book studios (firewire 800), 4 wd passport 500 gig usb 2 drives and a newish iMac 27 (32gb ram, 1tb fusion etc)

I keep all my events and projects on one of the 1TB firewire drives BUT I realise the more i work, the more I store (have been following articles on archiving by the way which has helped)

So, as I'm a 'Selfie' (note the most popular word this year stolen for this post), do I :-

a. Buy a WD 2TB My Cloud Personal Cloud Storage Gbt Ethernet USB 3.0 NAS server (not sure what this is but looks nice)

b. Buy a thunderbolt Raid (do i really need this)

c Just buy a 2tb usb 3 (7200 rpm)

PS and do i need to buy 2 of these and utilise one as a backup..

Hope you can help me understand and buy correctly people.. thanks in advance

If you can afford Thunderbolt, you'll get the best performance out of it.
USB 3.0 is really good for the money, too.
Never use USB 2.0 or FW800, both will slow you down, USB 2.0 will kill you.

You don't need to spend the extra money a NAS will cost you, won't give you anything you need extra.

As for size and brand, take a look at OtherWorldComputing, they have some very nice USB 3.0 RAID encolsures. I'm using an OWC Mercury Elite Pro Qx2, 8TB, via it's USB 3.0 port for my backup. It backs up a Promise Pegasus. Love it.

Yes, you'll want two drives or two RAID enclosures, one for working live with, one for backup. If you do this for a living, you MUST have a backup, or you're asking for trouble.
Here's my personal backup solution.

If you're not going over 2TB, I'd not look at expensive RAID solutions, not big enough for such costs.

Thanks, so maybe something like this "LaCie Thunderbolt D2 3TB" as my main drive and use the other 2 x 1tb firewire 800 as backups.. would that work?

Sure, it doesn't matter what the backup drive's speed it. Just means backups will take longer or shorter times. But if you have it automated for the middle of the night, who cares?

Now, not all T'bolt drives are created equal. But I've used LaCie 2TB T'bolt when they first came out, for 1080 HD projects, and I was pretty happy with it.

Great thanks for your advice, much much appreciated

I'd be inclined to get one good Thunderbolt drive for a working drive, then a USB3 drive caddy/adaptor thing for backing up on to bare drives. Cheap (you're not buying enclosures for each backup) and effective. Something like a 4tb G-Raid would be fine. Just be very methodical with your backups... Oh and if you do go down the bare drive route, make sure you spin them up every free weeks so they don't crap out on you when you need them!

Yeah I did have a look at that G-raid model yesterday, but the Thunderbolt model seems twice the price as the usb 3 model

I've been using this setup for about a year and a half and it's worked really well.

I have the 3TB Seagate Backup Plus Thunderbolt drive and docking station . It's $229 on Amazon right now and I get between 160 and 170 Mbps read and write. If you're used to using firewire 800 this will be a good speed bump and I find it fast enough for the work I do with DSLRs. While most of the stuff I edit is single camera, it also handles 16 angles of proxy media perfectly.

For backups I just got an additional Backup Plus, but I used to just use a firewire 800/USB 3.0 docking station and bare drives for backup.

This is the fastest and cheapest thunderbolt setup you can get. I've looked around and would like to buy something else, but I haven't really found anything other than this "toaster" thunderbolt docking station . I'd buy it but it just looks so cheap and junky. It's not even that cheap, it's just a cleaner and easier way to have more drives.

I've been very happy with this setup and highly recommend it for the very lowest price.

And now I must go as it's time for a backup.

Thanks Julian

Still unsure what to do, but have added the 3TB seagate to my list (very cheap in the uk at £89 if this is the same one?

My cheapest raid is a dual HDD dock connected via USB3. It has 2x3TB HDDs (total 6TB, if you use 4TB then you'd get 8TB) as raid 0 and on a MacMini is sustaining around 260MB/s read/write. This is plenty fast enough for most of the editing I do, even multi cam.

The dock was £50. Add bare drives and you're good to go.

As for backups, well, that's another story.