What HDD for photo storage... a NAS drive? Enterprise drive? 5400rpm drive?

[philmar]

I am building a new photo editing rig. NO gaming or video processing. As a recent retiree and photo enthusiast (early adopter of digital imaging) I have terabytes of old digital files I want to store on my new rig. Here is my new set up:

Drive A) 1 TB Kingston KC3000 for OS and programs
Drive B) 2TB N850X 2 TB for current projects I am working on
Drive C) 250GB Samsung 2.5" SATA for Lightroom catalogue and Windows scratch file
Drive D: An as yet unpurchased HDD

After about 2-3 months I will transfer photo files off of Drive B for long term storage on to Drive D, a large terabyte HHD that I plan to purchase. (I will also have external backup).
It's been 11 years since I've purchased a HDD and the landscape seems to have changed.
I'd like something between 16-20 TBs. There seem to be a dearth of consumer HDDs nowadays. I see sales on NAS drives and Enterprise drives. It seems like they can be used on a home PC. Some people discourage them because they seem to be always on, are noisier and consume more power. Others suggest they are better quality than the consumer HDDs. I will be only writing to them maybe once a month...though I may access them to work on a photo I'd taken previously. This probably might happen ten times a month when people purchase prints from me.
I'm wondering if the slower 5400 rpm drives are better for my usage - they are quieter I assume and hopefully cheaper. And if I rarely access the info on them I doubt if I care if the disks take a few seconds longer the 20 times a month I'll access them.
Conversely I wonder if the NAS/Enterprise drives will be a waste of energy consumption if they never idle down - do they never idle down?
What are your thoughts?

[Bob__]

Instead of getting one big drive get a bunch of small drives and set them up so that they are in some sort of raid config so you dont lose your work. A about 5 8TB drives in raid 5 would give you one drive failure and 32 gb of space. this can be used for a larger drive or more drives too. An enclosure does not cost that much either. https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Tray-Less-Docking-Station-DS-SC5B/dp/B07Y4F5SCK?source=ps-sl-shoppingads-lpcontext&ref_=fplfs&psc=1&smid=A29Y8OP2GPR7PE 

https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-BarraCuda-Internal-Drive-3-5-Inch/dp/B07H289S7C

All in all it will cost less than 1000 dollars

[Agall]

12 minutes ago, philmar said:

I am building a new photo editing rig. NO gaming or video processing. As a recent retiree and photo enthusiast (early adopter of digital imaging) I have terabytes of old digital files I want to store on my new rig. Here is my new set up:

Drive A) 1 TB Kingston KC3000 for OS and programs
Drive B) 2TB N850X 2 TB for current projects I am working on
Drive C) 250GB Samsung 2.5" SATA for Lightroom catalogue and Windows scratch file
Drive D: An as yet unpurchased HDD

After about 2-3 months I will transfer photo files off of Drive B for long term storage on to Drive D, a large terabyte HHD that I plan to purchase. (I will also have external backup).
It's been 11 years since I've purchased a HDD and the landscape seems to have changed.
I'd like something between 16-20 TBs. There seem to be a dearth of consumer HDDs nowadays. I see sales on NAS drives and Enterprise drives. It seems like they can be used on a home PC. Some people discourage them because they seem to be always on, are noisier and consume more power. Others suggest they are better quality than the consumer HDDs. I will be only writing to them maybe once a month...though I may access them to work on a photo I'd taken previously. This probably might happen ten times a month when people purchase prints from me.
I'm wondering if the slower 5400 rpm drives are better for my usage - they are quieter I assume and hopefully cheaper. And if I rarely access the info on them I doubt if I care if the disks take a few seconds longer the 20 times a month I'll access them.
Conversely I wonder if the NAS/Enterprise drives will be a waste of energy consumption if they never idle down - do they never idle down?
What are your thoughts?

2-5 8TB or higher RED drives (several manufacturers all consider their NAS drives 'red') in some sort of enclosure or through a motherboard's chipset. Raid1 with two drives should be sufficient as long as you're monitoring it.

Otherwise if you're looking at RAID5 or RAID6 for some capacity to redundant trade-offs. RAID6 being a sweet spot IMO.

[philmar]

Crap...I was worried that RAID would be the solution. I prefer to keep things simple. And just having spent several weeks and thousands of dollars trying to design this new build I am creating I didn't want to hear that My last build was a Gen 3 i7 3770k rig i made 11 years ago. A few weeks ago I never even knew what a NVMe was.

The HDD is the final piece of my build. the prospect of understanding/implementing RAID is daunting/exhausting for me. Yeah - you can judge me.

I think I'll go for the one disk solution and explore multi-disk RAID set up later after I've built my new computer.

I sincerely thank you for you time though!

 

[OhioYJ]

14 minutes ago, philmar said:

I think I'll go for the one disk solution and explore multi-disk RAID set up later after I've built my new computer.

I sincerely thank you for you time though!

It doesn't have to be RAID. However trusting all my photos to a single drive would definitely worry me. All my PCs have two drives in them and then I just use a script to mirror them every so often. (You could automate this, but I like control over it, as sometimes I need to grab an old file or something). I do this even with stuff backed up to externals and to a NAS.  As it might be worth putting at least second drive on your radar at some point. 

[DrMacintosh]

11 hours ago, philmar said:

As a recent retiree and photo enthusiast (early adopter of digital imaging) I have terabytes of old digital files I want to store on my new rig

No matter what drives you have, if these drives don't have a backup no amount of SSD vs HDD or RAID vs no RAID can save you. I recommend looking into a cloud backup solution like Backblaze. You can backup whatever drives are connected to your PC as long as they stay connected once every 30 days. If all your drives are internal or connected 100% of the time, you won't have to worry about anything.

[DrMacintosh]

11 hours ago, Bob__ said:

set them up so that they are in some sort of raid config so you dont lose your work

the fact that the drives are in RAID has nothing to do with the ability to not lose work. RAID allows for simple drive failure, nothing more. (aside from possible read/write performance improvements). RAID doesn't give you versioning, does not give you the ability to recover anything, and does not save you from theft/natural disaster. Only a cloud/offsite backup can do that.

[philmar]

4 hours ago, OhioYJ said:

It doesn't have to be RAID. However trusting all my photos to a single drive would definitely worry me. All my PCs have two drives in them and then I just use a script to mirror them every so often. (You could automate this, but I like control over it, as sometimes I need to grab an old file or something). I do this even with stuff backed up to externals and to a NAS.  As it might be worth putting at least second drive on your radar at some point. 

I have 3 copies of my photo files. In my PC, on desktop externals and on externals at my sister's house (I update and swap externals every major holiday/family birthday - a good reminder). I look at RAID and see multiple drives and multiple points of failure - not catastrophic failure but expensive drive replacement failure due to more drives. With my simple plan if a drive fails I do have backup. At this point I just need a HDD - and wasn't sure if NAS or Enterprise HDDs were suitable for home PC storage. I didn't want to spend $300 on something that was useless, incompatible or possibly too hot or noisy.

[philmar]

1 hour ago, DrMacintosh said:

No matter what drives you have, if these drives don't have a backup no amount of SSD vs HDD or RAID vs no RAID can save you. I recommend looking into a cloud backup solution

I see now that I never bothered to mention in my OP that I do external backups. I really am interested in a large capacity HDD for my pc - they all seem to be NAS or Enterprise drives  - of which I am ignorant. I've avoided Cloud storage because I have a distrust of corporations - not sure i want to hand over personal files to people I don't know.It isn't just photos I need to backup - personal info as well. Not sure I want to transmit it over internet. Also I have a fekload of data and I imagine the uploading is a PITA. Cloud storage is added expense. I like having my data in my home and a single offsite locale.

 

When I said I wanted a single disk solution I meant I prefer to add another single disk in my PC - i still have multiple external desktop WD My Books.

[DrMacintosh]

11 minutes ago, philmar said:

they all seem to be NAS or Enterprise drives

There is absolutely no downside to using a NAS or "Enterprise" drive in a personal PC. As long as the drive is SATA (with one very new type of HDD as an exception) it will work. I just put a 12TB Seagate Ironwolf NAS drive into a 4 bay USB HDD enclosure. It's my Plex server drive now.

 

As for "the cloud" I uploaded 4TB of data to Backblaze in 4 days, granted I have 500/500 Fiber internet. If you have cable internet and data caps, Backblaze probably won't work for you. Backblaze encrypts everything in transit and on their servers, you can also encrypt that data again with a private personal key. It's as secure as can be.

 

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html#:~:text=Backblaze takes security seriously. All data is stored,will be unable to send it to you.

[OhioYJ]

2 hours ago, philmar said:

I have 3 copies of my photo files. In my PC, on desktop externals and on externals at my sister's house (I update and swap externals every major holiday/family birthday - a good reminder). I look at RAID and see multiple drives and multiple points of failure - not catastrophic failure but expensive drive replacement failure due to more drives. With my simple plan if a drive fails I do have backup. At this point I just need a HDD - and wasn't sure if NAS or Enterprise HDDs were suitable for home PC storage. I didn't want to spend $300 on something that was useless, incompatible or possibly too hot or noisy.

Then you're good. I do a similar thing as well. Actually I use Enterprise grade drives in all my machines. My Steam library even sits on a WD Gold drive actually, along with my data. 

[Blue4130]

8 hours ago, DrMacintosh said:

There is absolutely no downside to using a NAS or "Enterprise" drive in a personal PC.

Noise. I use HGST enterprise drives and they are MUCH louder than WD blues or other lower end drives. Other than that, it all benefits.

[philmar]

7 hours ago, OhioYJ said:

Then you're good. I do a similar thing as well. Actually I use Enterprise grade drives in all my machines. My Steam library even sits on a WD Gold drive actually, along with my data. 

THANKS! Excuse my ignorance...what is Steam?

[philmar]

49 minutes ago, Blue4130 said:

Noise. I use HGST enterprise drives and they are MUCH louder than WD blues or other lower end drives. Other than that, it all benefits.

Thanks...my current build was in a wonderfully quiet Define case....am going with what I will assume be a breezier but less noise muffling Lian Li 216 this time. Noise may factor in to this then....but maybe the noise will be a good thing as it may cancel out my old man tinnitus

[philmar]

I notice the WD Reds have double the cache of the Seagate Iron Wolves...does that make them faster in read speeds? or is it one of those measurements that means nothing in real world experience?

[OhioYJ]

8 hours ago, philmar said:

THANKS! Excuse my ignorance...what is Steam?

Steam is a game store. The library is just where the Games files are stored.

7 hours ago, philmar said:

I notice the WD Reds have double the cache of the Seagate Iron Wolves...does that make them faster in read speeds? or is it one of those measurements that means nothing in real world experience?

Cache helps both on read and write speeds. I would lean a little more towards helps more on write speeds. However cache isn't everything, as there are different recording technologies (CMR vs SMR for example which can have a big difference on performance), RPM (the Red line has 3 different models of "Red drives") make sure the drives you are looking at are comparable in other ways.

[wseaton]

There are so such thing as enterprise HDs. Pricey server HDs have failed me at the same rates as desktop drives. Only difference is I typically have a better warranty on the server drive, which accounts for its higher price.

 

 

[GnorthernGnome]

On 3/30/2023 at 5:54 AM, DrMacintosh said:

There is absolutely no downside to using a NAS or "Enterprise" drive in a personal PC. As long as the drive is SATA (with one very new type of HDD as an exception) it will work. I just put a 12TB Seagate Ironwolf NAS drive into a 4 bay USB HDD enclosure. It's my Plex server drive now.

 

As for "the cloud" I uploaded 4TB of data to Backblaze in 4 days, granted I have 500/500 Fiber internet. If you have cable internet and data caps, Backblaze probably won't work for you. Backblaze encrypts everything in transit and on their servers, you can also encrypt that data again with a private personal key. It's as secure as can be.

 

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html#:~:text=Backblaze takes security seriously. All data is stored,will be unable to send it to you.

Good to hear! I'm actually in a very similar situation to OP, and had seen conflicting information online about whether TLER being enabled on NAS drives has any kind of impact on use as a "typical" desktop drive. It seems from your comment that this isn't the case, which is good news, as I'm struggling to find 7,200rpm drives that aren't NAS-rated these days.

 

One other question though (to you or OP, if they went with a NAS drive): are drives like IronWolf much louder than e.g. Barracudas? I don't think it will overly bother me (I imagine my system fans will still be louder and I have a quiet case) but worth considering.

[DrMacintosh]

8 minutes ago, GnorthernGnome said:

are drives like IronWolf much louder than e.g. Barracudas?

At higher capacities, yes. The 12TB Ironwolf drive I went with (ST12000VN008) is very loud when active. It makes lots of knocking and thud sounds which cut through all the other HDDs in my enclosure. If it wasn't a NAS drive I'd be concerned. It sounds a bit like these drives, just louder

 

[GnorthernGnome]

Oh wow, thanks for that. Definitely a bit on the loud side then. Any suggestions on 4TB+ 7,200rpm desktop drives that aren't EOL? I'm not finding many options...