Hi, when I came Back For the Conowingo Dam with my 1,000 photographs (30 GBs of files) and tried to download them into my photograph folder on the iMac, I received a hard drive full message. Going from my R5 to a Z8 increased the number of photographs by a factor of 3. ( R5 7 frames a sec. & Z8 20 frames a sec.) And if you’re not keeping track of the number of keepers, you can run out of hard drive space.
At this time, I am moving my photographs to a 2 Tb Crucial SSD. The Crucial is my travel hard drive.
This is not a good long-term answer. I need the 2 Tb drive for my travel backup.
I have been looking at DAS (direct-attached storage) and NAS (network-attached storage) systems.
I am looking to create a 4 Tb Raid 1 backup to keep my photographs in and use the iMac’s internal 500 Mb drive for online processing of the photographs.
How are members storing their photographs?
Peter
I have an M1 MacBook Pro and only 1 TB internal SSD., which is half full with documents and programs. I have an external SSD that I can download to if there isn’t enough room on the internal, and where I can store stuff until it gets edited and the keepers put on the RAID (18 TB). But I HATE THE RAID!!! I have to eject it to do anything on the computer as I keep getting the spinning beachball which often runs for maybe 30 sec and when it’s finally done I can’t remember that I was doing. It’s worst in LR and PS but happens too much with simpler applications. I have things set to not let drives sleep, but that isn’t enough. Here are excerpts from the answer I got from the forum for the Thunder Bay SoftRAID system I have:
MacOS has multiple bugs in sleep/hibernate/DarkWake areas. Applications such as Photoshop and Lightroom frequently access disk resources even when they appear idle. They use scratch files, memory-mapped files, and metadata queries that are sensitive to storage latency. When macOS performs one of these Thunderbolt or NVMe power or status checks, I/O to the RAID can briefly stall. During that stall, applications waiting on disk access block, which results in the spinning beachball until the operation completes. Applications that rely less on continuous disk access, such as Microsoft Office, may not be affected or may mask the delay. There is currently no way to fully disable these Thunderbolt power-management events in software. However, the following steps can reduce their impact: Avoid using the RAID as a scratch disk for Photoshop or Lightroom; use the internal SSD instead. [I do!] Even during active use, macOS performs periodic Thunderbolt and NVMe power-management operations that are independent of system sleep. Utilities like Caffeine prevent the system from sleeping but do not stop these hardware-level events. When they occur, disk I/O can briefly stall, which causes storage-intensive applications like Photoshop to pause.
I spent enough money on this thing that I haven’t bothered to find out if other RAID hardware and software is any better, but it doesn’t sound likely. I would just go with something like the 8 TB drives I use to back up the RAID. I rotate two sets, between the house and one of Ted’s airplane hangars. (The one whose door I can actually open.)