I've been running two separate external drives and manually trying to keep everything important on both for many years which has worked fine.
When I'm working with big drum scans from large format negs, the layered PSBs frequently exceed 10 GB, I take steps like having 16 gb of ram, emptying off my desktop, and setting the scratch disk to dedicated empty 500 gb external ssd. I do all this on a 2012 macbook pro, with an internal SSD 250 gb that I try to leave at least 50-80 gigs free on.
Recently I've been shooting a lot with an A7r2 and gathering quite a but 4k video footage in addition to piling up more 5x7 film drum scans, and my 4 and 5 tb externals are both nearly full again.
My question is whether upgrading to a RAID with dual 8 or 10 gb drives is worth it? Has anyone ever had a drive fail where the RAID totally saved the day? Obviously I would still need a third drive to keep offsite in case of theft, fire, etc, but I can't decide if dropping the dough for a RAID set up is a smart decision. I guess I'd like to not have worry about upgrading for 3-5 years instead of doing it again in a year....for those that do think RAID is the way to go, any thoughts on 1 vs 5?
On the other hand, none of the folks I know who work on pictures seriously with computers bother with the whole RAID thing...it certainly would be cheaper to just buy two of the least expensive seagate 8 tb models and just keep doing what I've been doing...Any thoughts from those with experience would be much welcome...
Gracias,
Chester McCh
Bookmarks