Help me choose my storage solution

[ipedro]

Yesterday MacRumors helped me pick my next Mac. Today, I'm looking for a solution for storing my photography and video libraries.

I'm a photographer and have been doing some video lately. Yesterday I bought a 27" iMac i7 3.4Ghz with 2GB graphics and a 1TB fusion drive. Aperture is just screaming on this thing.

The one bottleneck with my new iMac is storage. I have about 4TB of photos and video in archives on multiple drives and my working library is about 300GB. I could have paid a little more for a 3TB Fusion drive but I'd still have the same problem: having to regularly go through my library to archive photos I don't plan to need on hand. I'm trying to avoid this and just have one Pro Library (including all the archived images) and one Personal Library.

So I'm leaving that 1TB for everything other than photos and video libraries. Which means that I need an external drive for this purpose.

I've been looking at the Drobo but will having my photo library on an external drive slow down Aperture?

For Aperture experts: How do I get around this? Can I have my library with previews on the iMac's Fusion Drive and then the master images on an external drive?

For storage experts: I want to have local redundancy to protect against hardware failure but I also want to have a drive that I can store off site. Does the Drobo permit this? If I had 3 HDD's in the Drobo, can it use two to mirror eachother and then one to carry off site?

[MCAsan]

I put my libraries (documents, photos, music, movies) on a LaCie 2Big Thunderbolt 6GB box. The two drives are set up as RAID 1 mirrored 3GB. On site backup is a 3TB Time Capsule.

I import photos onto the internal SSD and edit in Lightroom, PSE, Nik etc. the finished photos are moved via Lightroom to the libraries on the LaCie drives.

[Razeus]

Bitcasa.

[thejoshhoward]

My setup has been quite reliable for over a year now. I run my Aperture libraries from an external drive and it's still blazing fast. It might be a hair slower than running off an SSD, but it's never been frustrating.

External Drive 1 (Daily Use, Redundant Storage): Pegasus R6 with 6 1TB drives set to Raid6. It allows for two drive failures before I'd experience data loss and is still very fast. This gives me a total of 4TB usable space.

External Drives 2 and 3 (offsite backup): Two OWC Mercury Elite Pro 2tb drives. This isn't ideal, but I don't have it in my budget yet for a second bad@ss enclosure. I end up splitting the data over the two drives manually.

Don't know if this is particularly helpful, but I can vouch for the awesomeness of the R6.

[ipedro]

I just noticed that the LaCie 2Big Thunderbolt has a delivery window of 1-2 months. The Apple store I called tells me they no longer have them in stock. Has LaCie announced something new?

I know Thunderbolt is still developing and these first generation external drives are bound to have teething issues. Thunderbolt on PCs are starting to trickle in so the market is bound to expand this year.

I can afford to wait another month or two as I re-organize my library on the internal 1TB Fusion Drive, back up to a local Time Capsule and to a 1TB WD MyPassport Studio drive for offsite backup.

Anything new announced at CES or elsewhere?

[LaCieTech]

Originally Posted by ipedro

I just noticed that the LaCie 2Big Thunderbolt has a delivery window of 1-2 months. The Apple store I called tells me they no longer have them in stock. Has LaCie announced something new?

I know Thunderbolt is still developing and these first generation external drives are bound to have teething issues. Thunderbolt on PCs are starting to trickle in so the market is bound to expand this year.

I can afford to wait another month or two as I re-organize my library on the internal 1TB Fusion Drive, back up to a local Time Capsule and to a 1TB WD MyPassport Studio drive for offsite backup.

Anything new announced at CES or elsewhere?

ipedro, the 2big Thunderbolt is available on LaCie's site and at other resellers.

LaCie announced the new 5big Thunderbolt at CES this year, which offers up to 20TB of storage. Check this page for more info on all of LaCie's Thunderbolt products: http://www.lacie.com/us/more/?id=10149

Thanks,
TL, LaCie

[ipedro]

Originally Posted by LaCieTech

ipedro, the 2big Thunderbolt is available on LaCie's site and at other resellers.

LaCie announced the new 5big Thunderbolt at CES this year, which offers up to 20TB of storage. Check this page for more info on all of LaCie's Thunderbolt products: http://www.lacie.com/us/more/?id=10149

Thanks,
TL, LaCie

LaCie Tech, I sent this to you in a PM but I think the thread could benefit from your response to this question:

Thanks for your input in the thread about a backup solution.

I'd like to please get your feedback on what I plan to do:

I purchased the LaCie 2Big 6TB. I consulted with an Apple Genius and it appears that my original intent seems to be the way to go:

1 - Aperture library kept small (no masters) on the iMac's internal Fusion Drive
2 - Masters kept on the LaCie in RAID 1.
3 - Rotate 3 HDDs inside the LaCie and off site. 2 kept on site mirroring eachother in RAID 1 and another kept off site. Every week or so, bring a drive home and swap it out with one of the drives in the LaCie.

...though there is stlll a lingering question:

Q: Will the LaCie need to reformat the new drive and copy everything over again or will it simply fill in the differences since it was last plugged in? The Apple Genius thinks that it varies by drive manufacturer but that the LaCie appears to be hot swappable.

LaCie even sells drives with the bracket that seems to be for this very purpose.

If it needs to rebuild the entire RAID every time, then this will put too much of a burden on the drives that need to be read and re-written every time they're swapped. If the incoming drive only needs to be updated, then this is not much more than if it were in the bay the whole time and is a viable solution.

[twitch31]

I would not recommend pulling drives in and out of a RAID array as a regular practice. I think it is also dangerous practice to separate masters from catalogues as is complicates backups and (more importantly) recovery especially if that recovery is to be done by someone other than you.

I'd recommend
1) For your live environment; a fast, on-site, always attached array. This holds all your masters and catalogues. RAID is optional. Thunderbolt arrays are more than capable of running catalogues and masters together.
2) 2 external drives or enclosures of similair size to your main array. RAID is not required (unless RAID-0 if need > 4TB). High performance is not required. USB is fine, even USB2. Ideally these would be of the same brand & model (as each other, not the same as live array) so allow you to move only the enclosure and not the usb & power cables when you swap onsite with off.
3) You then need CCC or SuperDuper to run nightly to clone from the storage mentioned in point 1) to 2).

You then have a high performance live environment, and a simple backup strategy that doesn't involve yanking drives out of RAID arrays.

good luck

[dmax35]

Originally Posted by ipedro

For storage experts: I want to have local redundancy to protect against hardware failure but I also want to have a drive that I can store off site. Does the Drobo permit this? If I had 3 HDD's in the Drobo, can it use two to mirror eachother and then one to carry off site?

My 2cents would be leave your apps on the fusion drive.

Purchase a external raid drive either from G-Tech or Caldigit in a Tbolt or USB 3 since your system has it for your Aperture libray/media files. For your backup solution add a G-Tech Gdrive running time machine.

Personally I don't care for LaCie as they tend to be noisy.
I've had good luck with both G-Tech and Caldigit products. G-Tech uses enterprise Hitachi drives in their systems.

Best of luck with your new system, sometimes it gets confusing what product or solution to go with having multiple products and options out there.

[ipedro]

I don't trust Time Machine. I own a Time Capsule and I won't throw it out, but it's given me nothing but trouble.

Last year after coming back from a month long trip, I unloaded all my photos and videos into Aperture on my MacBookPro. It happily backed up to Time Capsule as it had been for over the year that I've owned it.

Weeks later, I unloaded that Aperture library on to an external WD MyBook 1TB for archiving and when turning around, I tipped that drive over and it tapped the desk lightly. **click click click** I thought, no problem, I have my Time Capsule which had just recently backed up. I opened Time Machine and it couldn't load the drive. I tried to mount the .sparsebundle manually and look for the recent backup but it's corrupted. Likely because I had just recently updated to Mountain Lion and the original Time Machine had been set up with Snow Leopard. It's been 2 years now and I haven't been able to read the data off my Time Capsule. Yesterday I tried to open it up so I could run it as a standalone external HDD and ran every possible fix. Nothing could mount that Time Machine backup.

I've given up on the photos from that trip. It's cheaper and less aggravating to just do the trip again than to try to recover the photos off either the broken HDD or the corrupted Time Capsule.

Luckily for me, all my work had been stored on dual offsite HDDs stored in my safety deposit box at the bank. I just lost that trip and nothing more, no thanks to Time Machine.