What to do with 36TB on my Mac?

Western Digital (WD) just released their new Digital MyBook Thunderbold Duo the other day and it features 2-2TB or -3TB disks and of course you can daisy chain up to 6 of these together just in case, for up to 36TB on a Mac.

I have been happy with my desktop storage which has been running about 80% full.  Plus I have a 1TB time machine external drive for online backups which I use more than I care to admit.  But what the heck am I going to do with 36TB.

Enter Apple TV

Well, now that the new Apple TV is out and it supports 1080p video that problem might be solved.   I am starting to think of transfering my entire DVD/BlueRay collection to digital format and loading it all on iTunes. That way I could use Airplay and Apple TV to play it to a TV.

This is where the 6 to 36TB of storage could come in handy.  Especially if I wasn’t interested in streaming everything off of iCloud and having a local iTunes repository onsite for all my videos.

Digital video for the iPad

Today, I don’t have a lot of videos on my desktop, mostly ones I wanted to view on my  iPad so, they are highly compressed and only take up about 1GB per video (Handbrake encoded from DVDs).

I am thinking the new 1080p iTunes encoded videos would take up more space at least 4-5GB per video but would still be considerably better than 9GB for DVD and ~36GB for BluRay, high definition videos.

Given current storage I could probably handle converting my current iPad videos over to the 1080p version (if I actually owned them in hi-def) but if I wanted to put the rest of my video library on my desktop I don’t have enough space.

Bulk storage meet the Mac

Then WD came out with their new Thunderbolt Duo drives.  It seems to have it all, Thunderbolt I/O at 10Gbps, with all the storage I could possibly need.  Presumably the 2 or 3TB drives are 5400 or 7200 SATA 3.0 drives.  But they are user swappable, so could concievably be changed out to whatever comes out next but probably in pairs.

Of course with SATA 3.0 they can only go 6Gbps to the disks, but it’s not a bad match to have 2 drives per single bi-directional Thunderbolt channel.  Although whether 6 of these  daisy chained on a single Thunderbolt cable would generate decent performance is another question.  Then again, how much performance can one Mac use?

I suppose my next steps are to upgrade my Mac to hardware that supports Thunderbolt, get Apple TV, buy a Duo drive or two and then start encoding my DVD/BluRay library.

But that’s too logical, instead maybe I’ll just get Apple TV and give iCloud a try, at least for awhile and save the WD Duo for the next evolution.  Maybe by then WD have come out with their 4TB drives, providing 8TB per Duo.

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