Chuckarelei wrote:
I would not want to store all 8 TB data in one single drive.

Get two.
do it twice?
but... I agree with you.

Chuckarelei wrote:
I would not want to store all 8 TB data in one single drive.

I can remember when people said that about 128mb CF cards

For backups, it sounds much more convenient than 4x 2tb or even 2x 4tb's

Personally, I'll be curious to see the price point and how it compares in price per TB.

DougBPhoto wrote:
I can remember when people said that about 128mb CF cards

For backups, it sounds much more convenient than 4x 2tb or even 2x 4tb's

Personally, I'll be curious to see the price point and how it compares in price per TB.

I remember Floppy drives. LOL Ow and cassette tape back up drives.

Caitin Bre  wrote:
I remember Floppy drives. LOL Ow and cassette tape back up drives.

Yep,
I remember when the IBM PC was delivered with one 5 and one quarter inch floppy drive and no hard drive.  I am not sure they had been invented yet.

Yep,
I remember when the IBM PC was delivered with one 5 and one quarter inch floppy drive and no hard drive.  I am not sure they had been invented yet.

8" floppy drives - 160k per disc

HHPhoto wrote:
I remember when the IBM PC was delivered with one 5 and one quarter inch floppy drive and no hard drive.  I am not sure they had been invented yet.

Apple's Apple II and Cromemco supported hard drives by the late 1970's/early 1980's, though the drives were bloody expensive, and you had to add a special card for it. I seem to recall that a 5 megabyte drive was over $4000; I certainly couldn't afford it then. 5 years later, prices were around 10% of that.

FWIW, the first commercial hard drive was a 5 megabit drive from IBM in 1957.

HHPhoto wrote:
http://www.gizmag.com/seagate-8tb-hdd/3 … d-76696169

I have been using 2 TB and 3 TB drives to store photos.  The 3 TB drives feel slow at start up and and during search for files.  I have assumed it is because computer is older than drives and was released when 1 TB but not 2TB drives were common.

I wonder if 8 TB drives will only be practical for back up instead of general use because of access time.  (One 8 TB drive would replace all four 2 TB drives in my Drobo unit.)  8 TB would be great for offsite backups.

DAMN!!!!!
LOL i love technology.

Chuckarelei wrote:
I would not want to store all 8 TB data in one single drive.

This is pretty much the standard reaction to any big increase in data storage. I can remember when people were aghast at the thought of storing one whole Terrabyte in a single drive.

I believe these drives are aimed mainly at high-density data centers. 5tb drives haven't made a big impact in the retail chain yet.  But yes, a pair of these mirrored is every D800 owners dream.

Visual Delights wrote:
Last week I got one of the new Western Digital Green 6 TB internal drives for my Mac Pro. I'd already had all my photographs through the year 2011 on an external 6 TB Western Digital MyBook, which now serves as the backup for the contents that's on the internal drive. Before then I had to back up the external drive by putting bits and pieces of its contents on smaller older drives, which was cumbersome.

I like being able to search 6 TB of photographs all at once.

My MacPro is the 2007/2008 version.  I think there was an update (new model) in mid-2008.

When did you get your MacPro and how does it perform when accessing a 6TB internal drive?

Edit: I split by photos up by year between two internal 3TB drives and access times seem slow and boggy at times.  In addition, I sometimes have to relaunch "finder" when browsing images to eliminate the spinning wheel because "finder" is "not responding".

Thinking Inside The Box wrote:

Apple's Apple II and Cromemco supported hard drives by the late 1970's/early 1980's, though the drives were bloody expensive, and you had to add a special card for it. I seem to recall that a 5 megabyte drive was over $4000; I certainly couldn't afford it then. 5 years later, prices were around 10% of that.

FWIW, the first commercial hard drive was a 5 megabit drive from IBM in 1957.

I don't remember any 5Meg hard drives for the Apple ][, but the Corvus drives were the first I remember and it was 20Meg for about $5K around 1981.

Andrew Koenig wrote:
I vaguely remember that there's an architectural limitation of 4TB for a single drive at the moment.

Moreover, with a single point of failure for that much data, you would probably want to use something like a Drobo anyway.

None that I'm aware of.

I know if you're going to use anything larger than 2TB, you can't format it using FAT.  (well, you CAN, but it'll only see it as a 2TB drive) You have to go NTFS to see the whole available space.

Chuckarelei wrote:
I would not want to store all 8 TB data in one single drive.

Agree! I use 4 - 2tb Hd's. It still takes to long to defrg a HD. It's just a matter of when a HD will go bad on you! Not if!

terrysphotocountry wrote:

Chuckarelei wrote:
I would not want to store all 8 TB data in one single drive.

Agree! I use 4 - 2tb Hd's. It still takes to long to defrg a HD. It's just a matter of when a HD will go bad on you! Not if!

And in 5 years, you'll be backing up to four 8TB drives instead of one 32TB drive, saying the same thing.

Because if you REALLY were worried about losing all that data, you'd have it triple redundancy backed up on 40 500GB drives and it would take up half of the room in a closet.

There was a time when someone said "500GB drives??!!  No WAY I'm putting that much of my data on any single drive!!"

mophotoart wrote:
when lightning hits or a computer fails, and surge protection does not save it,  better have a backup...the capacity depends on your business, the same with your schedule...cost per TByte....real issue...what do you want to pay to save what you want......why save 2 on 8

Battery backup is a good idea if you're concerned about this. The batteries will only power a computer and a RAID system for a few minutes, but it makes sure that your computer shuts down like a normal power outage, and not a surge or stagger like a brownout.

I'm using one of Monster Cable's silly high-end power centers, which is actually meant to power several thousand dollars worth of home theater equipment. Highly recommended. I used to live in a neighborhood that lost power a lot, and in six years I never had a single piece of gear fry on me, even when storms blew out my neighbors' TVs. I'm not Monster's biggest fan, but the power centers are great.

That said ... If I were doing much freelance work, I'd have a battery backup between the power center and my PC.

Zack Zoll wrote:

Battery backup is a good idea if you're concerned about this. The batteries will only power a computer and a RAID system for a few minutes, but it makes sure that your computer shuts down like a normal power outage, and not a surge or stagger like a brownout.

I'm using one of Monster Cable's silly high-end power centers, which is actually meant to power several thousand dollars worth of home theater equipment. Highly recommended. I used to live in a neighborhood that lost power a lot, and in six years I never had a single piece of gear fry on me, even when storms blew out my neighbors' TVs. I'm not Monster's biggest fan, but the power centers are great.

That said ... If I were doing much freelance work, I'd have a battery backup between the power center and my PC.

My friend in the Poconos has a standby generator that powers his house when the power fails.  We never noticed when the power failed.   

Caitin Bre  wrote:
I remember Floppy drives. LOL Ow and cassette tape back up drives.

HHPhoto wrote:
Yep,
I remember when the IBM PC was delivered with one 5 and one quarter inch floppy drive and no hard drive.  I am not sure they had been invented yet.

Yes...they had.  They came in 5 MB, 10 MB, and 20 MB.  Soon afterwards, they had 40 MB. These were also larger than the current hard drives. 

When the 8086 IBM PC processor was replaced by the Intel 286...then 386...hard drive capacity got up to 270 MB's.  When the Pentium 1 hit, we saw the first 1 GB hard drive, and it astounded everyone.

Michael Zahra wrote:
I have a 20TB (5x4tb) LaCie 5Big Pro RAID drive.  All you need.

Very nice.  I see that company also makes your own personal Cloud solution.  I didn't even know this existed.

David Stone Imaging wrote:

Caitin Bre  wrote:
I remember Floppy drives. LOL Ow and cassette tape back up drives.

Yes...they had.  They came in 5 MB, 10 MB, and 20 MB.  Soon afterwards, they had 40 MB. These were also larger than the current hard drives. 

When the 8086 IBM PC processor was replaced by the Intel 286...then 386...hard drive capacity got up to 270 MB's.  When the Pentium 1 hit, we saw the first 1 GB hard drive, and it astounded everyone.

Before platter hard drives, there were storage cards that would install into the motherboard like a video card or sound card. My dad had a work computer in the house with a 40MB hardcard.  At the time, that was huge.

It's interesting to see how "expansion" cards are nearly obsolete except for the more hardcore users.  Sound, video, communications and I/O are all built directly into the motherboards now.  And as soon as cloud storage becomes ubiquitous, I imagine that we'll all just be using terminals without local storage at all on them.


I don't miss futzing with IRQ settings to get the damn 16 bit Turtle Beach sound card to work.

Or having TWO video cards in your computer, one for 2D rendering and a completely separate one for 3D graphics.

Chuckarelei wrote:
I would not want to store all 8 TB data in one single drive.

It might be more data, but the quantity of files are about the same.
4k video and layered 16-bit D810 files take a lot more space than HD files and D700 photos.
Thus I will eventually need the space.

Good Egg Productions wrote:

Before platter hard drives, there were storage cards that would install into the motherboard like a video card or sound card. My dad had a work computer in the house with a 40MB hardcard.  At the time, that was huge.

It's interesting to see how "expansion" cards are nearly obsolete except for the more hardcore users.  Sound, video, communications and I/O are all built directly into the motherboards now.  And as soon as cloud storage becomes ubiquitous, I imagine that we'll all just be using terminals without local storage at all on them.


I don't miss futzing with IRQ settings to get the damn 16 bit Turtle Beach sound card to work.

Or having TWO video cards in your computer, one for 2D rendering and a completely separate one for 3D graphics.

A lot of hardcore users don't even use expansion cards anymore. It's common for a media server to go USB out to an external DAC, and practically bypass the sound card altogether. It's less common for recording, but it happens there too. These days, I think it's pretty safe to say that you only need expansion cards if you do production video or CGI.

When I built my last system, I wrote Adobe to ask what I needed to make sure CS6 runs perfectly. They essentially told me that for photos I should have a card, but don't go nuts. The programs are written so that RAM covers 95% of it, and they told me that unless I was comparing two cards of vastly different price, anything with the same amount of RAM would run more or less identically. Again, for photos.

Michael Zahra wrote:
I have a 20TB (5x4tb) LaCie 5Big Pro RAID drive.  All you need.

All files on the same place?

What about disaster recovery


I want to say that we can reduce the risks, but there is no 100% warranty.

About the memory(disks, cards, etc.) I have a rule - if there is an anouncement for new capacity I would use 4 times less than the max - it's cheaper and clear that the technology don't have problem with such capacity.

HHPhoto wrote:
http://www.gizmag.com/seagate-8tb-hdd/3 … d-76696169

I have been using 2 TB and 3 TB drives to store photos.  The 3 TB drives feel slow at start up and and during search for files.  I have assumed it is because computer is older than drives and was released when 1 TB but not 2TB drives were common.

I wonder if 8 TB drives will only be practical for back up instead of general use because of access time.  (One 8 TB drive would replace all four 2 TB drives in my Drobo unit.)  8 TB would be great for offsite backups.

You should always have at minimum double and triple copies of each file.

You could use multiple 2TB or 3TB and then have one 8TB as your backup so that you will always have at least two copies of everything.  The 8TB should be in a firesafe and only use when backup images.


Personally, I like 8TBs.  I will wait until it is under $200 each and then I will be two for backups.

HHPhoto wrote:
Edit: I split by photos up by year between two internal 3TB drives and access times seem slow and boggy at times.  In addition, I sometimes have to relaunch "finder" when browsing images to eliminate the spinning wheel because "finder" is "not responding".

I have the same model as you, with four internal 3Tb drives and twelve (I am not kidding) 2Tb and 3Tb external drives attached to the original USB 2.0 ports.  I don't have any problems with access speed and I don't have problems with the spinning beach ball.

I do have 20 gigs of memory, but about half of that would still be adequate.

So, assuming you have sufficient memory, I would do two things: buy a copy of Disk Warrior to repair your directory structure, and do a clean reinstall of your system software.

HarryL wrote:
I can't imagine loosing @ once  8T of works. No way I careless love the way the works spread on 1 , 2 & 3t Of course they might have the recovery plan but still scare my world out:)

Yeah, I've lost a 2 TB and while it wasn't full, it SUCKED BIG TIME!!!!  Right now, I'm looking for about the same size, but at the same time, I'm also thinking about alternative forms of backup, maybe something online form of backup........  Any thoughts????

David Stone Imaging wrote:

Caitin Bre  wrote:
I remember Floppy drives. LOL Ow and cassette tape back up drives.

Yes...they had.  They came in 5 MB, 10 MB, and 20 MB.  Soon afterwards, they had 40 MB. These were also larger than the current hard drives. 

When the 8086 IBM PC processor was replaced by the Intel 286...then 386...hard drive capacity got up to 270 MB's.  When the Pentium 1 hit, we saw the first 1 GB hard drive, and it astounded everyone.

The IBM PC never used an 8086. The PC and PC/XT used 8088. I got an XT with 10MB hard drive, and the cries were "how will you use all that space?". Now I have a camera shooting RAW files that are several times the size of the hard drive.

---

Every brand of drive fails. You are deluded to think brand X failed therefore I'll use brand Y. Your strategy must be that the failure of any one drive (or even any two drives) will never cause you to lose data. If you don't have three copies of a file, you are at risk of losing it.

I deliberately spread my data across as many brands as possible. If there were a nightmare failure of, for example, firmware on one brand, then I'd still have my data safe on the other brand/s.

Perfectly OK to use 8TB drives, as long as you have enough copies of your data spread around. For me that means multiple RAID boxes for on-line access, and external hard drives for backup. YMMV