2018 came and went, and my reliance on cloud-based services increased. It’s not at all a bad thing. Services like Adobe’s Creative Cloud, Amazon Prime’s unlimited photo backup, One Drive, and Google Drive have changed the way I work. Streaming services like Google Play Music, Google Play Movies, and Netflix mean I don’t care much for locally stored media anymore. Hell, with data portability, it doesn’t even matter much what computer I’m working on. My primary computing device for the past month has been a Surface Pro 2017 – The exact same Surface Pro that got me through 5 weeks split between Ontario and Iceland last year. Yes, I missed the extra processing grunt, storage space, and RAM, but I didn’t miss my software environment – I had that with me, for the most part.
The only thing I’m feeling that I’m struggling with is portability of the only media I like to keep locally – My RAW files. I detailed my process for keeping local backups of my RAWs in my previous blog post, and I’m going to need to keep doing that. I do however want to eliminate the file server from the equation. With no other locally stored media, and all my RAW files already backed up to Amazon Photos, drive redundancy is just a nice thing to have. Sitting on a network share means I’m really not getting much performance increase out of having a RAID10 equivalence setup. It feels pretty poor having a setup that can hit almost 800mbps read and 400mbps write at max but be speed limited to a single gigabit ethernet connection. I could setup NIC teaming, but I really want to cut down on space taken up physically as well.
I’m looking at a few options, some being a bit more expensive than others. We’ll start with the cheapest and go from there.
Option 1: The cheapest
8TB external hard drives are surprisingly a lot cheaper than bare drives. I now understand after looking at prices why people buy these and shuck them instead of just buying bare drives. Makes sense from a cost perspective. An 8TB Seagate Backup Plus Hub offers a 2 USB3.0 port hub on the front of it, and a USB3.0 connection to the computer. Read and write performance per reviews is close to a bare drive connected internally. The one disadvantage here is it’s another device (although much smaller than the file server) that takes up space on a desk. The other disadvantage is expansion. The only real option is to get a larger drive and migrate the data or plug in a second drive. 8TB is a lot of photos however, with my current crop estimated at under 600GB.
Option 2: The middle ground
I could spend a bit extra and grab an 8TB internal drive. I’ve got a lot more selection available to me – Different drive speeds and warranty options most importantly. Expansion is possible by adding additional drives. It’s more streamlined as it’s internal, but it also reduces airflow in my already airflow optimized machine as I’d have to add the drive cages back in. There’s also the noise thing. My computer is also noise optimized – As detailed in previous posts on the build, it’s essentially silent. All fans either don’t spin or default at the very minimum rotation speeds, and all storage is currently solid state. Even quiet hard drives make some noise, though I doubt I’d be able to hear them over the mild buzz my monitors make.
Option 3: Gucci
This one is a bit over the top, but with the falling prices of flash memory it feels like it makes a bit of sense to grab a 2TB M.2 SSD and use that as my photos drive. It’s CONSIDERABLY faster than any hard drive with reads and writes in the vicinity of 500mbps, access times are instantaneous, and it’s dead silent. I also don’t need to add drive cages back in. The only issue is it’s only 2TB of space. With my current usage, and the possibilities of me shooting more, it’s likely I could exceed that within a year or so. Expanding is still fine as I can add more internal drives, but drive cages would have to go in, etc. Not exactly the best situation.
Weighing the options
As of now I’m leaning toward the cheapest option. It’s very unlikely I’m going to exceed 8TB of storage space in a few years, and by the time I’m looking to expand beyond that it’s very likely the storage environment would have changed considerably. As is now it should also offer better performance than my networked solution. If the single drive fails, I just warranty or replace it, and download the lost data from Amazon. I won’t lose any work either thanks to my workflow in Creative Cloud – I’m hoping to keep 6 months to a year worth of work on Adobe’s cloud storage, so would only struggle if I needed to go back past that.