Like many people I have been storing my photos in a fairly unsystematic way for the past few years resulting in a number of 'versions' that in one way or another duplicate themselves unnessarily over the various drives. I have started using Aperture and think this time I could stick with it. My question is having three drives with 60% or more common content what might be a good strategy for reducing to one set plus backup on another drive ( I now have a 640G that's empty) using Aperture? If anyone has been through this scenario, I'd love to hear from them. Many thanks for any help.

I am in the same situation. And converting from Windows to Mac. Don't know your situation, but at this point I am using Windows SyncToy (free) to get all my images in one location. What I need now is something to check for exact matches for folders I have copied out, but still are duplicated in my normal heirarchy...
So, I too, am open to suggestions. (and there is still the question of the library:)

I noticed in Aperture you do get multiples of images showing up together in a row whic is useful but where they are all on separate disks I think it presents more of a problem. Perhaps the idea is to extract them from their folders and have them all lumped together. Having three disks makes it complicated though. Still working on it...