External Hard Drives

[Simmo1111]

My photo collection is slowly starting to grow but I am still saving them on my PC. The 'norm' seems to be to get an external USB hard drive to save them on.

Can anyone advise as regards the sort of capacity I would need. Obviously the correct answer here is 'it all depends on how many pictures I intend to put on it' but I always go way over the top in such matters. Out of ignorance I bought a 16 gig card for my camera and discovered that 4 gig would be more than ample !

Any advice on the better/more reliable brands would be welcome too.

Thanks very much.

[Simmo1111]

Ooops !!

Sorry guys.. Just noticed the same subject in a post a few days ago ...

[citrinella]

My photo collection is slowly starting to grow but I am still saving them on my PC. The 'norm' seems to be to get an external USB hard drive to save them on.

Can anyone advise as regards the sort of capacity I would need. Obviously the correct answer here is 'it all depends on how many pictures I intend to put on it' but I always go way over the top in such matters. Out of ignorance I bought a 16 gig card for my camera and discovered that 4 gig would be more than ample !

Any advice on the better/more reliable brands would be welcome too.

Thanks very much.

Hi Simmo,

Didn't see the earlier thread :-)

I wouldn't go too big. Intuitively I'd expect a medium sized drive to be more reliable and faster than the biggest money can buy. The medium sized will hold an awful lot of photos. In the long term a second one can probably be bought cheaply, and technology will have advanced. With two you should be able to keep two copies of valuable work, giving greater security.

I bought a 0.5TB, and it has loads of storage though it backs up my business data as well as 5 years of photos. This was a replacement for 40 Gig which was just beginning to be limiting (my computer is only 80 Gig, and that is still OK). In a few years I could put a second internal drive into my computer for all non-current photos, if my computer lasts that long.

Mike.

[njlarsen]

Make sure you buy two. Place one near the computer and run off that; use the second one for backup, and store that in a different house (at work, with your family or whereever) so that in a crash, fire, etc. it will only be few and recent images that are lost.

Niels

[RAH]

I second the postings from the others - 2 smaller drives are better than one big one, and maybe cheaper too. I got a 320GB drive for $35 the other day because they were fillinf the shelves with the new 1TB drives.

[Duke Leto]

If money is no object get a Drobo (http://expertsinstorage.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?q=drobo&x=26&y=9&price=3%2C100) and stick in a couple of hard drives, it mirrors the drives so you always have real time duplication, its the way to go and very expandable for the future...

The ultimate in storage and backups and looks the part too

[revs45]

I shoot in RAW and am onto my second 1TB Lacie drive and as i don't delete nearly enough it looks like 1TB per year is about right for the amount that i shoot.
Good thing they are so cheap these days.
By the way, i'm not one of those "machine gun" shooters when it comes to snapping pics either, just get out as much as possible.

[hollis_f]

I shoot in RAW and am onto my second 1TB Lacie drive and as i don't delete nearly enough it looks like 1TB per year is about right for the amount that i shoot.

That's about 40,000 images a year - or one image every 7 minutes (assuming you only shoot in daylight) every single day of the year! Surely they can't all be keepers? Perhaps you need to be a bit more ruthless in culling images?

Just out of interest, how do you keep track of them all?

[Duke Leto]

Revs45 why don't you post some of those great images on Flickr on BF?

Worst than that Frank, if he uses a D300 which produces RAW files roughly 18Mb in size with no compression it 55555 images, that makes it one shot every 5 mins.........

[revs45]

Revs45 why don't you post some of those great images on Flickr on BF?

Worst than that Frank, if he uses a D300 which produces RAW files roughly 18Mb in size with no compression it 55555 images, that makes it one shot every 5 mins.........

I meant to respond earlier but was delayed at work.

Actually, the first 1TB drive filled up quicker than normal because i had transferred over an old 100GB drive full of shots from 2007-08, still i was surprised how fast it filled up, although i admit that a small percentage is non-bird related.

We took 3 bird photo trips this past year to Thailand, south Texas and Arizona/California so maybe produced more shutter clicks than usual.

The new 1TB drive was put into operation at the end of July of this year and has 747GB free (32GB of that is a folder from '08) from a total of 931 at this point.
Near 200GB has already been consumed in the 3 some odd months since purchase.

The RAW files are all 16bit which when i look at my file sizes (straight from camera) come out around 11MB on average but when converted to TIFF 16Bit format (which is the format i work with in PS) the same file becomes 70MB.
I then make internet-ready files (small size) as well as fine print quality files (large size) of select shots.

Like i said, i don't delete enough stuff, 90% of the shots taken in a days outing usually don't make the cut for various reasons.
if i was smart, i would weed them out the day i upload them but i usually run out of time, lucky enough to get something up on the ol' Flickr site the same day.

I just realized i should mention as well, that some of the shots on the drives are Audy's (my wife) as well, however she shoots infrequently these days due to time constraints.

How do i keep track of it all?
I've had a Flickr account since 2006 and can track down most pics by looking them up on the site, taking note of date taken and published and then tracking down originals on the drives which have all folders labeled by date.

I just want to say that external drives (no matter what size you get) are a godsend, i used to spent far too much time burning dvd's.

I would like to post more stuff on BF, thanks for the nudge : )

[Duke Leto]

The RAW files are all 16bit which when i look at my file sizes (straight from camera) come out around 11MB on average but when converted to TIFF 16Bit format (which is the format i work with in PS) the same file becomes 70MB.
I then make internet-ready files (small size) as well as fine print quality files (large size) of select shots.



Why do you use compressed RAW and then save them as TIFFs? I dont know the answer but it seems illogical, if you want the ultimate in quality then surely uncompressed raw files must be the best starting point.
Sure someone will correct me

[Adey Baker]

Why do you use compressed RAW and then save them as TIFFs? I dont know the answer but it seems illogical, if you want the ultimate in quality then surely uncompressed raw files must be the best starting point.
Sure someone will correct me

The cameras actually compress raw files anyway, so they come out at different file sizes depending on how much detail is in them. Hopefully, it's a fairly lossless compression.

[njlarsen]

If you are using Adobe, then their compressed raw (DNG) is supposed to be completely lossless. I don't use raw, but if I did, I see no reason why I would convert to Tiff instead of keeping the raw images and only do anything to those I need to work on.

With the jpg images I take, any edited images get saved in .psd, not tiff, as I expect to stay with adobe products.

Niels


Niels

[hollis_f]

It cerainly sounds like you could do with some Digital Asset Management software. Somehring like Lightroom. I find that's enough for over 95% of my processing - so there's no need to store a lot of tiffs, just produce jpegs at the appropriate size when required. It even has a special export to Flickr plug-in. That would make it a lot easier to find images again.

[Fozzybear]

The D300 has an option for compressed, lossless compressed or uncompressed RAW, plus settings for 12 bit or 14 bit... plenty to play with! I tend to used 12 bit lossless compressed on my D300.

The Drobo looks really cool, I'd rather like one of those as I'm currently using a main drive in the PC for current use, backing up to a USB drive and also from time to time backing up to a second USB drive as a fall back. My only concern (other than cost) is that although you're covered if there's a problem with a hard drive on the drobo what happens if the drobo fails? If you put the drives into a replacement drobo will it just carry on as before or would you lose your data?

I assume it's intended to be left running too, which I wouldn't really want to do. Although it probably would be really good I may well be better off to stick with what I have and make sure I have a good backup regimen... certainly cheaper! ;)

[Duke Leto]

The cameras actually compress raw files anyway, so they come out at different file sizes depending on how much detail is in them. Hopefully, it's a fairly lossless compression.

My D300 has 3 settings, no compression, lossless compression or compression with loss. My point was that you an choose no compression which should deliver RAW files larger that 11Mb (on mine they all tend to be around 18Mb) then this has to be a better "negative" than with compression on.

[Adey Baker]

My D300 has 3 settings, no compression, lossless compression or compression with loss. My point was that you an choose no compression which should deliver RAW files larger that 11Mb (on mine they all tend to be around 18Mb) then this has to be a better "negative" than with compression on.

Yes, I agree that if you have the option then choosing no compression must be the best way, though not all cameras have the option.

[hollis_f]

Yes, I agree that if you have the option then choosing no compression must be the best way, though not all cameras have the option.

Not sure why no compression should be better than lossless compression? As well as taking up less drive space the compressed files may actually load faster - depending on whether it's your processor or hard drive that's the bottleneck. And with most modern machines I'd say the HDD is the slowest component.

[revs45]

Why do you use compressed RAW and then save them as TIFFs? I dont know the answer but it seems illogical, if you want the ultimate in quality then surely uncompressed raw files must be the best starting point.
Sure someone will correct me

Hi Steve, i am using PS CS2 for processing and unfortunately i can't open D300 RAW files in it, and am forced to save as TIFF to work with them.

As for uncompressed or not, there is still a lot that i need to look into when it comes to processing and this discussion will force me to take another look at how i do things, most of what i have picked up thus far is by trial and error.

Cheers!

[Duke Leto]

Hi Steve, i am using PS CS2 for processing and unfortunately i can't open D300 RAW files in it, and am forced to save as TIFF to work with them.

As for uncompressed or not, there is still a lot that i need to look into when it comes to processing and this discussion will force me to take another look at how i do things, most of what i have picked up thus far is by trial and error.

Cheers!

If you download the dng convertor from adobe you can convert raw to the digital negative format, you could also shot straight in tiff.