[Leica] Consensus on external hard drives

[michael.francis at gs.com (Francis, Michael)]

For personal use I purchased the Infrant NAS box which currently has
1.6TB of storage in it (1.1 usable)- this is running on a GigE network.
My experience is that the product works very well, the performance is
good and the reliability what I was looking for (e.g. it just sits in
the cupboard and runs)- it is running in a RAID5 configuration. To avoid
the potential of the whole array becoming corrupted I use one of their
many built in backup options to automatically copy critical files (read
photos) to an external USB drive nightly. This drive is plugged into the
USB port of the NAS box. The files on the USB drive are regular copies
so the USB drive can be read by any computer without any special
software. One of the nice features of this setup is that both my laptop
and desktop mount the same drives on the NAS and so I now store no
permanent data on either computer. This setup also works rather nicely
for my CD collection, which I can play in any room through a Sonos
system :) 

Hope that helps.

Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: lug-bounces+michael.francis=gs.com@leica-users.org
[mailto:lug-bounces+michael.francis=gs.com@leica-users.org] On Behalf Of
Nick Roberts
Sent: Friday, July 21, 2006 6:59 AM
To: Leica Users Group
Subject: Re: [Leica] Consensus on external hard drives

Anybody got an opinion on standalone network drives? I'm considering
going down this route to give me extra backup storage easily accessible
from any of my home PCs - I was considering something like the Netgear
SC101 with a couple of 500 GB drives. Up to this point, I have used
external USB drives (with separate off-site DVD backups), but they're
not totally convenient... any thoughts?
 
Nick

----- Original Message ----
From: Nathan Wajsman <nathan@nathanfoto.com>
To: Leica Users Group <lug@leica-users.org>
Sent: Friday, 21 July, 2006 5:35:16 AM
Subject: Re: [Leica] Consensus on external hard drives


Hi Don,

Following Brian's advice regarding sizes (which he has posted before), I
buy the biggest drive that he considers safe. This used to mean 250 GB,
now upped to 400-500 GB, as he just wrote. I am on my third external
drive now. They are all connected to my PC but are always powered off
when I am not actually writing to them or retrieving files from them. 
All my RAW files and TIFF files (which contain my adjustments) are on
these external HDs. In addition, I also burn them on DVDs so that I have
two copies of everything; and I keep the DVDs in my office so that if my
house burns down my images will still be available.

I also stay away from all backup utilities, especially ones that
compress the files--then you are dependent on operating systems and
software continuity. I just use the copy-paste commands, and I am sure
that my HDs will be readable by the next generation of Windows, or by
OSX if I migrate wholesale to the Mac. Logically, if I have no problems
reading files written by Windows onto my 2 GB USB stick when I plug in
that USB stick into my Powerbook, then the same should be true of a 200
GB hard drive.

Nathan

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