External Hard Drives Options

[Neal Osborn]

I have a stipend/grant to spend on electronic equipment.  I am going to use the money to buy a new backup system for my computer and my focus is on my photography workflow.  I use Photoshop a great deal and recently changed over to Lightroom for my workflow.  

WHAT should I get?  Should I buy a 1TB or should I spend the money on a RAID? system (not really sure what this does but I understand it could be used for my “scratch disks”).  Basically, what do you guys think would be money well spent for a backup system and what would you recommend, keeping in mind I am starting to shoot a bunch of photos as I learn and doing more and more RAW.

[Chad Simcox]

Raid’s are your safest option, depending on the type of raid (there are different numbers/levels).
Everyone knows the saying “every hard drive will fail”. By placing your media or whatever other files on a single external HD, you’re opening yourself up to the risk of loosing your content when that drive fails. A raid works as a mirrored drive set up. So if one drive fails on a raid, there is a mirrored copy of it leaving the files still accessible.
Do I have a raid? No. But I would like to have one if I had the $ for it.

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http://grainfarmer.vsco.co/ iPhone photos
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[Neal Osborn]

Thanks Chad, I am going to read some more about the RAID drives but they seem a bit expensive for an amateur.

[matt boutet]

There’s an old adage in the IT world about RAID:

“RAID 0, isn’t”

Raid can be a great option for added security if you do it right, but make sure you do your research.

[Author]

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