# External Hard Drives - What are you using?



## msdarkroom (Mar 20, 2012)

Alright.
I'm guessing most of us have terabytes and terabytes of images.
What are you storing your pics on?

I'm a 3 copies, one off-site guy. I'm looking to buy a new HD or two as I'm running low on space, and I'm wondering what drives people are happy with.

Thanks.

-MS


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Mar 20, 2012)

I use a Qnap NAS. it has 8 hard drives, so you get 8X whatever size of drives you install minus overhead, of course depending on the type of raid you use. Mine has 2TB drives installed, so I have a lot of space, 

I do have 5 single drives that are esata and use a standard internal hard drive in a external case. They are my safety backup. I also have images uploaded to smugmug, but they are not backups of the original cr2 files. I have been studying DNG, and may start keeping a set of DNG's as well.


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## Axilrod (Mar 20, 2012)

I have about 10 different external drives for editing video. Several of them are G-Tech drives, several are Lacie, but I mainly edit off the Lacie Little Big Disk (thunderbolt) and the thing screams. I think I'm going to get the Promise Pegasus Thunderbolt Raid array (4x2TB) next to save some space.


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## CanineCandidsByL (Mar 22, 2012)

For travel, I usually carry three inexpensive laptop style external usb drives (preferably with USB 3.0 connectors on at least one). The fastest one is my work drive. The other two are secondary backups. I leave one in the car, one in the hotel room (or front desk safe), and I keep the working drive with me. Except when driving, I never have all three drives together; and for something really important I might even consider fed-ex one drive home.

At home, I have a server I custom built. The case is fairly cheap for what it was ($500) but it holds 24 drives and has a backplane that makes it easier to connect all the drives up to an arcadea raid controller. The controller is the most expensive individual part at $1500, but provides all the computers in the house with excellent throughput. The motherboard is a relatively cheap i5 based system with video built in. Since it just serves up files, it really just needs great disk IO and networking. I also have a firewire based external case that holds another 8 drives. These are not raided and contain backups. In the event of a failure, I can attach the box to any other computer and have access to the backups without any special hardware. I could also just pull the drives and attach via any standard drive docking system.

All that is combined with crashplan. Currently I have about 2.5TB backed up with them, although I have about 5TB of data that should be backed up (internet connection is the limit). My storage/backup needs increase by about 50 to 100GB a week, and I'm now able to backup to crashplan at a rate of about 200 to 300GB a week, so crashplan is catching up and I should be fully backed up in another 2 to 3 months. In the meantime, I keep extra backups on standard, cheap external USB drives which I store at my dayjob.

Overkill? Maybe, but we don't want to loose files.


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## JR (Mar 22, 2012)

I recently built myself a PC based system being able to have up to 8 drive in the same chassis where 6 of them can be hotswap (plug and play like in a Mac Pro). So I end up making 3 different copies of my work on 3 seperate hard drive, and I always have one up to date that I remove from my system and store somewhere else.

I would love to supplement this with a clound type backup but still need to look into this.


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## marekjoz (Mar 22, 2012)

CanineCandidsByL said:


> (...)
> 
> At home, I have a server I custom built. The case is fairly cheap for what it was ($500) but it holds 24 drives and has a backplane that makes it easier to connect all the drives up to an arcadea raid controller. The controller is the most expensive individual part at $1500, but provides all the computers in the house with excellent throughput. The motherboard is a relatively cheap i5 based system with video built in. Since it just serves up files, it really just needs great disk IO and networking.
> 
> (...)



Impressive. I have some technical questions, just of my professional couriosity.
What kind of disks do you use (sata, sas)? What type of networking and operating system do you use? How do you share files over the network and what is your network efficient data rate (ie how long does it take to download 1 GB folder with 50 CR2)?


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## CanineCandidsByL (Mar 22, 2012)

marekjoz said:


> Impressive. I have some technical questions, just of my professional couriosity.
> What kind of disks do you use (sata, sas)? What type of networking and operating system do you use? How do you share files over the network and what is your network efficient data rate (ie how long does it take to download 1 GB folder with 50 CR2)?



Thank you. Happy to answer.

I have multiple raid 5 and 6 arrays. The largest is a 9 disk raid 6 array with 3TB WD greens (Yes, they can work in a raid system, but peoples results seem to vary). I'd like to expand this array with another 3 drives, but the system became unstable the few times I tried.

The primary work array consists of another raid 6 setup with 4 3TB 3.5" Ultrastar 7K3000 Enterprise Hard Drive; I got to borrow some SAS drives and didn't find any benefit for just the few people in the family using it. So I got the SATA versions of these as well. They were selected for their long MTBF, but oddly its the only array to experience a drive failure (no data loss).

I have a junk array with various 2TB drives; Its stable, surprisingly, considering the incredible mix of drives.

And one last raid-5 5-drive 3tb WD greens. It used primarily for video.

I'm running windows home server 2011. I tried other operating systems before deciding on WHS2011. It provided the easiest management and server 2008 quality. I dont' knock any of the other options, this just worked well for me.

Throughput is limited primarily by the network. I was setup for bridged 1Gb network connections. The WHS2011 server had 4 bridged connections and the work horses of the house has 2 bridged connections. So you potentially could get 2 computers each moving about 180MB/sec sustained.
After a switch failure, I made a bad purchase and bought a new switch that wasn't compatible with bridging and haven't fixed that yet. So all systems are now limited to max of 1Gb or about 85 to 95MB/sec.

I wouldn't normally download files off the server, but work across it. Since normal hard drives (not SSDs obviously) only tend to get 70 to 90MB/sec, you actually get better performance using the server. However if I copy the data from 1 array to another over the network, 5GB of data takes a little under a minute. If I perform the same task directly on the WHS, the fastest speeds are around 400 to 500MB/sec so that same 5GB copy would take about 10 to 12 seconds. Since the raid card has an 8GB cache with battery for write caching, that may not including writing out all the data, but from the drive lights it only takes a few seconds more.

DNGs and CR2 (any raw file for that matter) is large enought that you get maximum throughput. Copying tens of thousands of little files does hurt performace tremendously. With the write cache, its still better than using a local hard drive.

I do have one video editing system that has its own local raid (0) arrays. For editing itself, I don't have any problems with the WHS system, but for capturing, small network hicups can cause frames to drop, especially when capturing HDMI signals (needed to get video off some older digital cameras which has poor driver support).

Let me know if you have any more questions.


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## prestonpalmer (Mar 22, 2012)

DROBO! Its the only way to go.


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## marekjoz (Mar 22, 2012)

CanineCandidsByL said:


> marekjoz said:
> 
> 
> > Impressive. I have some technical questions, just of my professional couriosity.
> ...



Thanks for info. It's really impressive system! I'm still partially in IT business with technical experience, so I can appreciate it. So you have some 20+ hard drives. You keep it in air contitioning room or fans are just enough?


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## EvilTed (Mar 23, 2012)

MT Spokane Photography,

The QNAP NAS is one of the fastest available, however, in stock form it has serious limitations.

You can install the latest 64-bit Ubuntu onto an external drive (after turning off the internal flash drive in the BIOS) and then you can configure it to do anything you want and not be limited to the services QNAP give you.

Ping me if you want details...


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## LuckyRosco (Mar 23, 2012)

I use a DROBO with Western Digital HDs. I have 3-2TB WD drives in my computer and I back up my best pictures again to a 2 TB WD stand alone unit. I quit using Seagate HDs after 1 to many failures. I've never had a problem with any of my Western Digital drives.


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## CanineCandidsByL (Mar 23, 2012)

> Thanks for info. It's really impressive system! I'm still partially in IT business with technical experience, so I can appreciate it. So you have some 20+ hard drives. You keep it in air contitioning room or fans are just enough?



The fans are enough. The ones that came with it are screamers and I didn't want to replace with quieter but lower cfm fans. Its a plus we have dogs as we do have to keep the house at a reasonable temperature all day long, even if we are both out. The down side is increased power bills.

Effectively I built a slightly different version of this server. There are several online reviews and even some videos of this and similar builds. The Norco case just lends itself to this concept.
http://www.wegotserved.com/2010/09/22/hands-norco-rpc4224-rackmount-chassis/


And I'd like to second the Drobo. You won't get the same sort of speeds, but they are pretty darn solid and easy to deal with. I have been considering one as a simple backup with its own drive failure redundancy.


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## RC (Mar 23, 2012)

Internal
- 2 Western Digital SATAs @ 6 Gbps 1, for system, 1 for photos & LR (2 Tb)
- 2 Western Digtial SATAs @ 3 Gbps, 1 for system, 1 for photo storage (1.5 Tb)

External
- 1 Western Digital 2.0 USB 1.5 Tb for archive storage. Drive goes in safe.

All photo images get pushed to 2 other PCs just in case. 

No too sure about off site storage services. Anyone got a good off site storage recommendation?


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## PeterJ (Mar 23, 2012)

All my important stuff fits in 2TB so I just use a handful of bare drives that I cycle between and load in a USB 3 to SATA docking station then store them in a fireproof safe in antistatic bags with the odd offsite copy. I had a bad run with external USB drives, I think the cheaper ones without fans and proper ventilation can run too hot in the Australian climate and I went through 2 or 3 before going that way.

For the larger stuff that's not so important (media that could be replaced given some hassle, $ etc) I backup to a Linux machine out the back with a bunch of older drives in a logical volume. I use Windows on my primary machine so use the free Microsoft Robocopy utility to mirror to the backup drives.


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## boateggs (Mar 23, 2012)

I use a nettop (this replaced an ancient laptop) running Ubuntu with 3 2tb WD drives in external USB docks. I use Mdadm to manage them as RAID 1 in software. I know hardware RAID is faster but for ~ $500 with a triple backup and an easy-ish to manage system with email failure notification, I'm not going to complain. It is fast enough to double as a media server for movies/tv shows to my Boxee and it works great.

I used to have the drives in dual bay USB enclosures, but after an enclosure failed and cooked the two drives inside I moved each drive into individual docks/enclosures.


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## YellowJersey (Mar 24, 2012)

I've been using a pair of LaCie rugged 1TB drives and they fit the bill better than anything I've come across. I'm pretty mobile and haven't lived in the same place for more than a year for the last seven years or so, so portability and durability are the two biggest things I look for in an external. No power cord needed; it's powered through the USB cable. The new ones have USB 3, which is nice. They work well for me. I've got another, older drive I use to back up just my masters. But I'd like to get one more of the rugged drives just to be safe.


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## Michael_pfh (Mar 24, 2012)

At home I am using a Buffalo NAS, on the go some Western Digital Passport USB drives. Will get a WD Passport studio with Firewire next...


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