Desktop storage upgrade for photography

[MatthewBowker]

Hi everyone,

 

I am trying to take my photography from a hobby to something I do semi-professionally. Currently I am storing all my RAW and edited photos on my desktop PC (as well as backing up to Dropbox and an external drive) which only has a 256GB SSD for storage. I need to increase this to 2TB for now but I'm not sure which hard drives I should get? I have been looking at Western Digital's Red NAS drives but I am not sure whether that's the right drive for me and I imagine there are cheaper alternatives which are just as good. These hard drive will be used almost entirely for storing photos on so they don't need to be performance drives. 

 

In my head I would like to get two 2TB hard drives and have one mirror the other in case one drive corrupts or goes faulty. I would imagine you would set this up in some RAID array?

 

Some advise is really what I am looking for and cheaper the better really, I would ideally like to only spend £150 on drives at the moment if possible. 

 

Cheers, Matt

[porina]

I'd suggest you get two drives the same size, one internal, one external. Doesn't matter what it is. Work off the internal one. Regularly connect the external and do a backup of the internal one, but disconnect after the backup is done. In this way you have a separated copy in case anything goes wrong with the internal one or save you from getting hit by malware. You just need to remember to make regular backups.

 

I've done mirrored drives for redundancy, but this wont save you if you lose files for other reasons. Also they're generally reliable enough that it doesn't add much value other than in possible uptime in the event of a failure.

 

As your dataset grows you might later consider a server for backups, but that would be some way off. It took me years to pass 1TB of photography data.

[Ryujin2003]

I helped a friend about a year ago with a project similar to this. We setup a small network cabinet for his home network, and he is doing video, music, and photo editing and some other library type stuff for his clients. We did a RAID configuration in a NAS, using WD Reds. I forget the size, but I think it was x4 8TB drives in RAID 5.

 

He was originally looking at starting with 3 TB drives since that would suit his immediate needs, but wanted to upgrade in a year or so. I talked him into larger drives because it's easier to have them at first than transfer data and setup a new array later. He hasn't experienced any issues with his NAS and drives, and the RAID 5 appears to be working best for him.

 

However, you do need atleast 3 drives for RAID 5 though, so if only using two, RAID 1 is probably best. I like RAID 5 because if one drive fails, you can rebuild easily by replacing that one drive.

[BlueCrazii]

4 minutes ago, Ryujin2003 said:

I forget the size, but I think it was x4 8GB drives in RAID 5.

Typo??

 

You prob meant to write 8TB

[Ryujin2003]

1 minute ago, BlueCrazii said:

Typo??

 

You prob meant to write 8TB

Yes, yes I did. It's not 1998. Good catch.

[MatthewBowker]

1 hour ago, porina said:

I'd suggest you get two drives the same size, one internal, one external. Doesn't matter what it is. Work off the internal one. Regularly connect the external and do a backup of the internal one, but disconnect after the backup is done. In this way you have a separated copy in case anything goes wrong with the internal one or save you from getting hit by malware. You just need to remember to make regular backups.

 

I've done mirrored drives for redundancy, but this wont save you if you lose files for other reasons. Also they're generally reliable enough that it doesn't add much value other than in possible uptime in the event of a failure.

 

As your dataset grows you might later consider a server for backups, but that would be some way off. It took me years to pass 1TB of photography data.

Would you recommend WD drives on a budget or another brand? And if you do recommend WD which colour drives? 

Thanks

[porina]

2 minutes ago, MatthewBowker said:

Would you recommend WD drives on a budget or another brand? And if you do recommend WD which colour drives? 

Personally I don't care much any more. I make the assumption any drive will fail at some point, so make sure I have multiple copies in separate places of anything important. So now I just buy mainly on price/capacity.