Working as a creative in various capacities for over three decades, data management has always been a factor in my daily life. Large image and audio files, video captures, motion graphic compositions, and desktop recordings quickly gobble up free storage space. As I’ve been imagining new and exciting ways to throw the kitchen sink into this little “superhobby” experiment and related plots connected to my pathway to becoming a “YouTuber,” I’ve also been considering the ramifications of recording live-streams,—on YouTube, Twitch, and Streamlabs OBS, etc.—in regards to my practical, day-to-day storage needs.
As things currently stand, my current data management system is functional, but cumbersome. I have three beefy desktop workstations, two laptops, and half a dozen mobile devices connected to my home office LAN, and at least a dozen external hard drives floating around my office space at any given time. It’s taken me years to amass this unwieldy collection. As far as external storage is concerned, there’s very little consistency among the brands and models of these devices.
Yesterday, I took the obvious next step and placed an order with Apple for a 24TB Pegasus32 RAID system. The published specs for this unassuming box with shiny lights report transfer speeds of 40 Gbps via Thunderbolt 3.
The global pandemic and related lockdowns are still wreaking havoc on U.S. shipping channels, so my order is currently scheduled to ship in early to mid-September. I’m guessing that it will actually ship sooner than that reported date, but I have enough storage at the moment that I can live with the delay. (I’ll follow up on this post with an unboxing video when it arrives.)
While it seems completely obvious to me that my transition into video makes this purchase an absolute necessity, the reality is that I’ve lived this long without buying a standalone RAID storage system. While I do have two smaller, dedicated RAID drives in my old Power Mac, this new, dedicated system is a very different statement of intent.
“40 Gbps”? OK, yeah, that’s sexy.