This is a good post to start the new year, seeing as we are heading to Vegas on our first jaunt, to CES, that veritable tsunami of circuits, wires, digits and tech. Will be at the Nikon booth, and looking forward to seeing friends and colleagues to kick off 2018.
An issue we had to confront last year had a distinctly technological bent. Namely, what to do with all the stuff we shoot? It’s a question every photog wrestles with. Storage. I remember naively thinking, as I switched to digital all those years ago, wow, no more lab costs! I did not appreciate or understand the digital realm enough to realize that hard drives and computers and, essentially, becoming my own lab, and storage facility had requirement that went far beyond buying some file cabinets and some slide pages.
We were noticeably slowing down last year and hampered by our older storage tech here in the studio. We were using outdated technology, and it was overburdened, with predictable results. We use a local techno-wizard firm, called Technology Revealed, who comes in usually about twice a year and takes our pulse as a studio. They monitor speeds, the aging of our workstations, our connectivity, etc. At their last visit, they had suggestions about where we could improve. Without hesitation, they recommended a Synology system, populated with Seagate Ironwolf Pro Hard Drives.
We have gained a number of things back as a studio, with this new repository. First, we have expanded capacity, and simultaneously have gained speed of delivery. At the same time, we reduced mess, and slimmed down our footprint. The unit is very compact. And, because we opt to have the drives right here in our workroom, we have come to value the quiet nature of the machinery. We can add on as we go, and need more space. And, Seagate drives have a great rep for dependability. At the same time, it’s kind of hard for me to believe that years and years of shooting are inside this little black box. Yikes! The wonders of technology.
You can read more about our Synology DS2415+ Model here.
More tk….
Good to have lots of storage. Just remember to have redundancy off site. Peace of mind if there is fire or theft
Hey Joe. Do you guys also back up in the cloud somewhere? Thanks for sharing what you’re using these days!
A word of advice, stick with Seagate, that’s fine. But source your hard drives from multiple vendors instead of all from one place.
Buying all the drives from one place means all the drives will be from the same batch and all the same age. This similarity increases the chance of a multiple drive failure at the same time. Even better, vary the drive vendor as well. Backblaze has invaluable data on HDD failure rates and the most reliable vendor/model in their inventory over the years.
Just having a RAID NAS doesn’t mean you can’t lose stuff. Get a second one and sync the two together.
No, not full backup. We have lots of select material up on PhotoShelter, but that is not a dupe of our entire storage system. We do an off site backup for sure, based in physical hard drives.
Thank you Adrian….excellent advice and I appreciate you checking in. All the Best, Joe
You bet…we do that religiously….
That’s a beast of a drive. Much jealous.
You are going to LOVE your Synology. I made the jump from Drobo a few years ago, and have scaled it a few times since then. I wish my SHR-2 transfer speed was a bit faster over the network, but that is by far the ONLY complaint that I have had. Once I had 4 drives fail all at one time. Thinking it was a fluke (and in a panic) I contacted Synology support, who remoted in and fixed it in no time flat free of charge (and definitely out of Warranty).
Best support in the business beyond a shadow of a doubt! Congrats on the new System!
Awesome, thanks for the heads up! We are def. pleased with this addition to our studio at this point…..all the best, Joe
Thanks for the heads up! We are very happy with this new addition to the studio….helping our workflow a lot!
I’m at that particular crossroads myself but I am cautious about putting all my faith in a relatively slow NAS system. How do you find the access speeds; that is, with a raw file working from a Lightroom catalogue? How much more laggy is it compared to when the same file is located on your scratch SSD disk or an externally (TB3/USB-c/USB3) mounted hard drive or RAID array? I get no lag with internal and external SSDs on the above ports and likewise with RAID5 external hard drives. I’m concerned that the relatively slow speed of the NAS data-connection will be a choke point. Looking at the specs, the sustained write speed (for a 1MB file) is about 40MB/s – less than 10% of the speed of my current setup.
Hey Adrian….I’m going to cut and paste the above question and push it over to Cali who is much, much more attuned to the specs you are discussin above than I am. Cool with you? He’s on vacation right now, but he will get back….Joe
Nice post!
fantastic , really useful & thanks for the post