endless external HD shuffle Part deaux

[Chester McCheeserton]

Less then 2 years later, I've filled up my 8tb external drive....

Do I,

1. Pay 300 for a 12 TB drive, swap it out, and keep going? (middle of the road option)

2. Buy a 6 TB drive, pull all my video stuff (which I don't access as much) off my big 8TB, label it Video, and keep going? (cheapest band aid option)

3. Same as above, but pony up an additional $550 for an OWC 16 TB Raid solution, and then run it in Raid 0....I've been having issues using the finder to search through all my big negative scans and layered files, (it never seemed to be an issue before upgrading to Mojave) I frequently have to force quit finder and it eventually will chill out and find the file, but real annoying....Additionally most of what I do now is use lightroom and work on files from 42mb digital....I can't seem to get a clear sense of whether a Raid 0 would help speed up Lightroom performance? (it works now, but takes a looong time to import from card, and is really slow/laggy rendering 1 to 1 previews....(costliest/gear head in me thinking this will make my art better option) but maybe it would??

still running a 2012 macbook pro - usb 3

[Corran]

I don't know what product you are referring to but if you've got some hardware around (older computers and the like) might I suggest you research UNRAID.

This software is free up to a certain # of drives. It is a "JBOD" array (Just a Bunch of Disks) but has parity drive/drives. You can just throw a bunch of disks in and go.

Here is a thread from some time ago where I talked a bit about it, as I was just building my server:

https://www.largeformatphotography.i...r-their-files/

7 years later and I still have the server running smoothly. I have upgraded it to 16 TB and I will probably be swapping some disks out this year to up the capacity to 24. You can access it using a simple network cable (cat5).

Personally I use an 8 TB external drive to cache and work on files, while RAW files and tiff scans get sent to the server for storage after finishing.

As for your issues in LR described above, I think you can attribute that partly to your 2012 MBP. Are you running an SSD?

[Chester McCheeserton]

Thanks for the link, I had not heard of UNRAID and there's some relevant stuff for me in that thread.

I'll dig around a but more about UNRAID, but I was thinking raid more for speed boost rather than storage....- I try to keep all data on 3 drives, 2 onsite 1 off, I know it's not ideal...has worked ok so far.

Yeah the graphics card and or processor on the 2012 MBP may be my limiting factor, although Yes I am running an internal 1TB SSD and have 16gigs of ram...One thing that may help is moving my LR catalogue to the internal SSD - right now it's on the external spinning disc....

[Corran]

I've never had my LR catalog off the system drive so I don't know how that interacts. It's probably a good idea to move it to the SSD. Easy enough to try it, anyway.

Just my opinion here, but I think deploying RAID 0 with spinning drives in 2020 just for speed reasons is probably a poor choice. Also, I haven't delved into this in LR, but if there is a way to designate a scratch disk, use your SSD.

[Sasquatchian]

Chester - How are you backing up these drives? The easiest thing is to buy the OWC two drive bay and set it up to RAID 1 where you have a duplicate drive in the same box. RAID 0 is never recommended for storage as when any single drive takes a dump - and they all do sooner or later - you lose everything. That's the reason RAID 5 is so popular - you can lose one or two drives (depending on configuration) and rebuild and still have reasonable speed and capacity. But for every drive or RAID stack you need a duplicate in case the whole thing takes a shit. And yes, I've had that happen too.

[Darren Kruger]

IKeep an eye out for the WD externals hard drives Currently when they go on sale the 12tb ones are like ~$185. 10tb version go for around $140-160, 8tb for around $120~130, and the 14tb for around $200.

If you are looking at the NAS route, another option would be to use a dedicated product like a Synology. You can mix drives sizes in one (with some restrictions.) I have one from 8 years ago that has been rock solid. More expensive than going the UNRAID route but less futzing and you can get support for it. Plus the enclosures are small, quiet, and more than likely use up less power than a server would. Another plus is that it has apps to automatically back to to a few cloud storage providers for off-site backup.

In going over the network instead of USB, you would only get up to 1gb of transfer rate. For the USB connected non-ssd drive, the max would be the the rate of the drive which would be around 3gb. If you went with a SSD via USB3, the theoretical max would be around 5gb. With your laptop being as old as it is, it might not have trouble getting close to those speeds.

-Darren

[Chester McCheeserton]

Thanks Corran - going to try moving the catalog over tonight and see if there's a difference. And your probably right re raid 0 in 2020.

Sasquatchian - When I started I was using Carbon Copy Clone to just back up and duplicate the partitions...but even that's gotten a bit muddled although I know I've got everything important in at least 3 places. But Yeah I was too broke to do the OWC move you mention a couple years ago, I got two single enclosure from them...each with an 8tb 7200 spinner.....then I have an 8tb western digital 5400 offsite...

And Thanks Darren - I'll look at the Western Digital - Those prices sound good as does researching NAS for when I'm ready to do it properly.

[Corran]

+1 on Western Digital drives.

I've had one failure out of...maybe 20 drives from WD (and that was after heavy use, and a lower-tier drive). Many years ago I decided to try some Seagate drives, perhaps because they were on sale or something, and they gave me a lot of problems. I think I had like 66% failure rate within a year or two. It was absurd. I will never buy a Seagate product again.

[jp]

+1 on WD. Lacie and other design/market brands often use Seagate for cost purposes so stay away from that too.. Ten years ago, Seagate was pretty good.

I have a desktop computer so plenty of room for drives in it. 250ssd for OS/apps, 4TB WD 99% full for old stuff. 1TB SSD for LR catalogs and current work. SSD makes a big difference for LR operation. My 1T SSD will fill before the end of the year, so my tradition is to move the data off the 4TB to something bigger (probably 8-10tb) and store the 4T offsite as an additional backup.

Use LR to move the folders/files and it won't get confused about where to find your photos.

I'm in the IT business of helping small businesses; people that need more storage than what I've use we currently recommend a Synology NAS box. You can do raid and add storage as needed, even with some redundant options, not raid0. For some people this is their main storage. For some, it's a backup destination. For some they get two Synology NAS in different locations for both purposes as they can do backups and replication better than most operating systems. We usually outfit them with 3 big WD red or gold drives. Then you can add more to grow storage later on. It's all open source type of stuff but Synology makes it easy.

Regarding your finder issue, you may find it useful to turn off file preview. That accesses, opens, and locks the file to build/show the preview. Soemtimes the files don't get unlocked or things get confused. Should not be a problem on normal internal drives, but it can be a problem with file servers.

[Chester McCheeserton]

Regarding your finder issue, you may find it useful to turn off file preview. That accesses, opens, and locks the file to build/show the preview. Soemtimes the files don't get unlocked or things get confused. Should not be a problem on normal internal drives, but it can be a problem with file servers.

Thanks jp, tried that just now but not sure I could see a difference. But it is something I will continue investigating...