Photo Storage

  A correctly configured workstation is the best way to increase productivity, profits and rev up the old Photoshop performance. The slowest part of your computer is the hard drive, especially if you’re asking it to multitask. Hard drives are very efficient if asked to do one job at a time but waste a lot of performance if they are doing more than one. Streamlining your workflow and using dedicated task oriented drives solves this performance latency. For a photo machine you’ll need at least three drives, or groups of drives. The first of these is your Operating System drive. Keep this drive as clean as possible with just the OS and applications. Natively, when Photoshop gets installed it will configure your OS drive as it’s scratch disk. This causes your most important drive to perform dual tasks slowing down both Photoshop and your OS. By providing Photoshop a dedicated scratch disk, the second drive, you allow the OS and photoshop to run much more efficiently with their own dedicated drives. These two drives should be located inside your computer if possible. The third drive or array of drives should be your database or library drive. This should be housed in a Burly Enclosure, exterior to your computer’s chassis. Since these drives contain your livelihood they must be kept as stable as possible and that’s what the Burlys do best.

  The photo database should be as fast as is reasonable without throwing money at it. You’ve gained a lot of performance by configuring your computer resources correctly. The external storage enclosure must offer the drives a stable source of power and adequate cooling for long term life. It must also offer a connection method that does not slow down your workflow. Port Multiplication Enclosures are the most economical while providing excellent performance which makes them the most popular with photographers. These enclosures attach to a Host Card that gets installed inside your desktop or laptop computer and provides multiple high speed eSATA attachment points, many times faster than Firewire. Each of these eSATA ports is capable of hosting up to 5 drives in a PM Enclosure. These drives can be configured as individual volumes (JBOD) or they can be RAIDed into larger single volumes with improved performance.

  If your computer type prohibits the installation of a host card a Burly Firewire Enclosure offers the same drive protection as the PM Enclosures. These Firewire enclosures have a powerful built in power supply and excellent drive cooling allowing for 24/7 operation. Most firewire enclosures have little on no cooling and brick power supplies that lead to early hard drive failures. The Burly Enclosures solve these problems and add the ability to swap drives in and out of the chassis as needed for archiving.

  Today we’re shooting with cameras that have huge image capabilities. We shoot and keep more photos than we ever did when we had to absorb film and developing costs. We store RAW as well as edited and non edited copies of our work. This means that our storage needs are constantly growing. Today’s cataloging applications like Lightroom prefer to have the database on a single volume. Once your database has grown to a certain point it will no longer fit on a single hard drive. In the effort to streamline this means creating a RAID. A RAID 0 will combine the individual drive capacities and their performance into a single large volume designed to work with Lightroom and other cataloging software. This database volume can be as large as required by including the number of drives needed. This RAID should be constructed in Disk Utility (Mac) or Disk Management (PC).

  As with any database a backup must be maintained. Working without a backup is akin to walking a tightrope without a net. Any digital data that you can’t do without should be kept backed up and current. The most cost effective method is to maintain a direct hard copy on a backup drive and use a dedicated software application to automatically perform backups on a daily basis. (Do Not Use Time Machine) If your library is stored on a RAID 0 you should have a second RAID 0 of equal size for it’s backup. This type of backup will protect your data from hardware failure as well as data corruption and human error if it’s managed properly.

  Now that you have your photo library on an automated backup routine and your workstation is working like a top, what’s left? Consider keeping an off-site copy or archive of your data. If losing your photos means going out of business or starting all over always keep a second copy stored in a different physical location. Catastrophic events do happen. Occasionally we have a customer call that has had their computer equipment stolen, burned in a fire or zapped by lightening. Consider what you would do in either event. We can always go out and purchase a new computer, but you can’t buy what was stored on it. It’s awful easy to keep a copy archived off-site. Hand your neighbor a hard drive or take one home and store it on a shelf or in a fireproof safe. It’s cheap insurance and the best Digital Asset Management!

CHECK OUT OUR PHOTO STORAGE GUIDE IN THE REFERENCE & INFORMATION SECTION