Lets Talk About Storage and Drives
Having a computer you can edit your photos on is important.. equally as important is how and where you are storing those images.
There is no one size-fits-all solution for storage.. and different kinds of storage/drives should be used for different things.
Types of Drives:
There are different kinds of drives and technology. They should be used for different things.
Laptop/Desktop Drives:
Hard Drive: Large, cheap storage, mechanical parts.
Solid State Drive (SSD): Also referred to as M.2 or NVMe drives: Smaller drives but have no moving parts, more reliable and can handle being moved around (laptops, external drives), more expensive, much faster than a hard-drive.
RAID: High Volume/Large Scale Drives/Enterprise Solutions: (A LOT OF STORAGE)
- NAS (Network Attached Storage) : Drive connected to your network, not connected directly to your computer. Slower transfer times, you wouldn’t want to edit files directly from it, but good for backup.
- DAS (Direct Attached Storage) : Drives connected to your computer, fast enough to edit off of
Cloud Storage/Online Backup: This storage you don’t own, you rent it from an outside provider. Its usefulness and effectiveness for you will completely depend on how fast your internet connection is. NONE will be fast enough to work off of. its great for backup as long as you have a fast enough of an internet connection to keep up with the volume of images you take.
Cloud Storage/Backup providers have two major business models:
- “unlimited” storage for a yearly rate (typically around ~$70.00) : this is very slow storage, this is for backup and in case of disaster, like a safety deposit box. In my experience its really not unlimited. The services tend to fall apart at about 10tb of data. It just cant keep up with backups larger than that. Because of this limitation, i tend to keep my last 2 or 3 yrs worth of photos on a service like this.
- Backblaze and Carbonite are the two big players. in this market. Last time i checked, Backblaze allowed you to backup external drives at no extra charge, while Carbonite charged you a nominal fee for external drives.
- “Pay for a certain amount of storage” (~ $120.00 a year for 5tb of storage) : this is faster storage that can be accessed frequently. Often used to share data with clients.
- Dropbox and Google Drive are the two big players in this market.
- Amazon S3, Glacier, Azure: These are enterprise level storage companies.. they sound good until you look at the fine print and the pricing. They charge you for the upload.. accessing the data and download.. it gets very expensive very fast.
What to Buy:
“I need a drive to throw in my bag and travels with me” = Solid State Drive (SSD)
you want an SSD, these drives are designed to travel… you also want to back this drive up on a regular basis.
Samsung T5 : small portable SSD
Sandisk Extreme SSD : small portable SSD
“I need a big drive to save all my photos, it’ll sit on my desk and not move“ = Hard Drive (HDD)
you want a harddrive/HDD.. you also want a backup of this drive.
Western Digital 14tb External Drive: $250.00.. thats ALOT of storage for 250.00.. good drive.. but thats a lot of eggs in one basket if it fails.. you better have a backup
Seagate 6tb External Drive : ~100.00 6tb external drive. good drive.. but make sure you have a backup
Drobo 5dIII : ~$800.00-$900.00 by FAR the easiest solution, expandable (you can add more storage to it, up to 64TB)
“i have way too many external drives to keep up with, i want to consolidate” or “i need ALOT of storage for my images”
“i want to be able edit images on this giant drive” : Drobo 5DIII : by FAR the easiest solution, expandable (you can add more storage to it, up to 64TB)
“i just need a place to store images i’m done with or for backup” :
Drobo 5dIII : by FAR the easiest solution, expandable (you can add more storage to it, up to 64TB)
Synology makes very good solutions too but they are more complicated to set up.
Technology inside NAS/DAS:
- RAID
- Custom Appliances (Drobo)
RAID Drives: (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) : a drive technology that uses multiple physical drives to create a redundant storage pool that looks and acts like a large single drive. This technology allows for a mechanical failure of one or more drives while still being able to access all your data easily (a drive fails but you wont lose anything).
*** THIS IS IMPORTANT *** : RAID Drives come in different configurations, the configuration makes a huge difference on reliability. Before you save any data on the drive you need to make sure its setup and configured the way you want. If you are using this drive for photography you will want it set up at RAID 1. VERY FEW DRIVES come set up as a RAID 1 configuration out of the box. You have to run the setup utility to do this:
Explanation of the configuration options:
- RAID 0 (often called Striping or Performance RAID) - typically over the counter RAID drives come in this configuration, this is NOT what you want for photography. RAID 0 is meant for pure speed, and NOT redundancy.
- RAID 1 (often called Mirroring) - like old school carbon paper, two drives that work as one. When you save a file, it saves that file on both drives. If one drive dies, you still have a copy of everything on the other.
- RAID 5 and RAID 10 (both performance and mirroring) - takes 3+ drives.. kind of a mix of RAID 0 and RAID 1.
Outside resources:
https://dirtybootsandmessyhair.com/best-cloud-storage-photographers/
https://photographylife.com/photography-backup-workflow
https://havecamerawilltravel.com/photographer/backing-up-photos-cloud/
https://www.myclickmagazine.com/best-photo-storage-and-backup-for-photographers/
https://petapixel.com/2019/03/13/how-i-handle-storage-and-backup-as-a-photographer/
https://photographylife.com/storage-for-photography
https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/buying-guides/best-external-hard-drives-for-photographers-desktop-storage-for-backing-up-images
https://savannahsmithphotography.com/blog/content/storage-and-backup-solutions-for-photographers