It is the holiday season and like many hotels and a certain Inn, there was no room left. For my photo files of course. So what to do? Get a bigger drive that’s what! Well, there was more to it than that. With the not so recent acquisition of my pre-owned medium format digital back the file sizes weren’t getting any smaller. It was bad enough scanning my 4x5 negatives where I would routinely end up with 250 MB files or larger depending on the scanning resolution and the editing I was doing. But with the Phase One P30+ back and getting deeper into Photoshop layers, luminosity masks and what have you, I was pushing 1 GB a file. In fact I recently edited a 4x5 negative at 3200 pixels per inch (why I don't know) and it ended up over 2 GB in size. Large enough for a really big print.
My previous set-up which served me well for some years was a 2009 macbook pro with 3 GB of RAM and a 250GB internal hard drive. I also was using a 2 disk - 2 TB external RAID drive which had a usable capacity of 1 B, and a 1TB back-up drive and an old 1TB drive that I was using as a scratch drive. Things started reaching the breaking point this summer. My RAID drive was almost full and my back-up was overfull with time machine dropping the older files. To add to the misery, my trusty macbook was running very slow in Photoshop and wouldn’t run LightRoom 5 at all. And it was giving me warning messages that basically said “I’m old and out of date, and can’t handle this anymore”. See my previous post for all the dreary details.
After doing some research I decided to ditch the RAID idea and go with single disk drives. I also decided to go for speed, i.e. a thunderbolt drive. As I am also thrifty (you must be thrifty in the photography game unless you're selling a lot of photos), I didn’t opt for the pricey multi drive Drobo or Pegasus drives and opted instead for a somewhat safe and speedy but not the safest or speediest solution. I’m not a business, just an enthusiast, so all I care about is not having to start from scratch if a drive breaks. So I ended up with a LACIE 3TB thunderbolt drive with their optional 125GB solid state drive. This holds my photo libraries and whatnot. For backup I’m using time machine on a HGST 4TB Touro Desk Pro external drive. I bought the Lacie direct from Lacie and the Touro from B&H because it was quite cheap and B&H has fast and easy shipping to Canada. By the way if you ever get a chance to visit B&H in Manhattan, find the time to make a visit. It’s as much fun as MOMA. I’m also using my old 1TB drive for a second backup using time machine to make alternate backups between the 4TB and the 1TB.
The switchover went smoothly with only a few glitches and everthing is now working. I intend to replace the 1TB backup drive as soon as I’m satisfied that the data on the old 2 disk drive isn’t needed anymore. Then I will format it, take it out of RAID mode and use it as a 2TB second backup drive, which should last for a while before I need to replace it with another 4TB drive. This setup is fast enough. Fast enough that sometimes things happen so fast I’m not sure it happened. Yes, things happen in the blink of an eye. I am reserving my old 1TB drive to be used with my old macbook pro as a music server on my decidedly analogue hifi. But that’s another story.