We're back from the cruise, and IMHO my "little" solution was a fantastic time-saving tool. We shot 349GB, or about 15,000 images, and one day was 157GB alone across 13 memory cards. I spent just enough time to copy the cards onto the SSD and create "tickets" for each card, then went to bed. When I woke up, all 157GB had been duplicated onto two additional drives and the data had been verified. I swapped the last HD for one in the safe, and kicked off the (bulk) second half of the process again, and by the time we got back from our excursion, it had all been copied to a third drive.

As predicted, the 240GB SSD wasn't nearly big enough for the whole week, but it served as a high-speed staging point that could handle two memory cards being written to it, a folder of images being checkpointed for later verification, and a folder of images being copied to HDD1 without seeming to slow down.

If anyone's interested, I'd be willing to share the scripts. They're written in perl, which runs on OS X 10.8 if not older. Drop me a line at templin at templin dot org and I'll send them out. I'm debating whether I want to write my own ingester between now and the Peter Read Miller Sports Photography Workshop in early October (the next major event when I'll be using the drives) - there's a lot of complexity to handle the possibility of two images on the same card but in different folders with the same name, etc.