Me and my Mac

Posts Tagged ‘storage’

MKV must be the worst video container ever :(

So i got this huge storage unit lately and am getting some movies to it. HD movies to be precise. With 5.1 sound and all that. It’s nice. But why does everyone want to put that stuff in MKV dammit. Use a real format like proper Mpeg (2 or 4) or h.264 encoded Mov. And not some dumb container which isn’t even a format by itself but just harnesses Mpeg or whatever format the movie is in. It brings only misery and frustration to the table.

So now i have to load every movie, wait almost 10 minutes for it to cache strip out all the MKV rubbish and crappy titles, names and whatever else the movie doesn’t need and save it as a proper format.

I’m sure it works fine in some players… But c’mon how many players are there? If you save it in a decent format, say Mpeg or even high quality Mov it will be much better playable and more importantly can be previewed from Explorer and Finder and doesn’t have to be cached. So it plays instantly.

Grrr!

A bunch of zeros

So after last weeks datadisaster i managed to recover many data using “data rescue II” at work. I decided to save office things only and loose any films, music and other data as i was not up for sorting through that again only to see it’s broken anyway, outdated or otherwise unnecessary to keep. Yea i had a lot of junk!

Anyway, i finally have a lazy day again and decided to put the “broken” 320GB disk back to work. But before i do that i’m writing it full of zeros to find if there are any bad blocks/sectors or whatever. I expect just that partition table to be broken so it’s another external drive for me if it works. So many disks lately… rating up to 4TB in total lately… Yea, it’s nuts.

How many external storage devices do you have?

Some small talk with some people over the past weeks made me think. How many external harddisks, memory sticks and cards do we actually own. Yes that includes the one from your camera too! But not your CD/DVD collection…

I did a quick count and came to 6. And a more thorough count went all the way up to 11.
Doesn’t sound like much… But still, 11 storage devices.

How many GB’s is that? Dunno… Quite a lot i think.
1x 320GB via Firewire (backup for iMac)
1x 320GB via Firewire (backup for Macbook Pro)
1x 320GB via USB2 (temporary storage for large files)
1x 120GB via USB2 (portable, when i leave with my bag, this thing comes with)
1x 256MB micro-SD (in my phone)
2x 32MB MMC cards (Nokia, unused)
1x 128MB Memory card (unused)
1x 320GB Ethernet disk (network storage)
1x 64MB CF card (System disk for my router)
1x 1GB MP3 player/Memory stick (unused)

A total of 1401.5GB (well over 1 TB). Including my computers it totals just over 2.8TB.

So how much do you have on the shelves?

A 640GB Bonus

Wut? Yes! hahaaa! I found 2 IDE drives in my magical closet of 320GB each. Not sure where they belong. But now they take care of the backups for both my Macbook Pro and iMac.

But… Yes, IDE drives. I bought 2 Macally 3.5″ USB2.0/Firewire400 casings. Turns out they’re stackable. Yay!
So behold! My massive storage tower… Isn’t it pretty? It’s aluminium seated on small rubber feet. The top one for my laptop and the other for the imac. Woohoo! Timemachine… No way, none of that… I bought SuperDuper! a while back. In all it’s awesomeness of cloning harddisks so that they are actually useful if the main drive fails. Instead of the mayhem Timemachine creates on a harddisk. Also Timemachine has proven me way too unreliable of loosing it’s contents or not recognizing the disk at all and thus has to reformat it for the “new” backup… Yea, rubbish!

Who let the phones out!!

Today all our phones died more or less. I’ve been sitting around switching someones data to a Mac from a PC instead of answering calls. While waiting for the data to copy a colleague walked in with a super sexy harddisk… I just had to have one. It has 2 FireWire 400 ports and, and this is the cool thing, a retractable USB2.0 port on a 3 inch cable. Wicked!!

So behold! The latest addition to the storage monsters!

A Lacie Little Disk “designed” by Sam Hecht. I don’t get the design part as it’s just a plain shiny black box… A monkey could be more creative than that. But hey, it looks nice anyway.