So how are you liking the Fusion drive?

[AppleFan360]

Way to go, because here everybody "needs" a shiny new 2012 iMac.

It's depressing when people consider just exactly what they want and and can afford to buy what is needed, while all the others who are purchasing something better and more expensive are a bunch of idiots who don't know what they "need" and the value of money.

Usually once these type of guys have access to more money their "needs" suddenly increase.

Grow up.

I rest my case. Might want to take your own advice.

 

[leman]

http://www.zdnet.com/mac-fusion-drive-pro-users-beware-7000006661/

Sorry, but the article is entirely stupid. First of all, its baseless speculation (I don't see any tests), second, its full of contradictions. He is criticising HFS+ (quite rightly), but HFS+ does not have anything to do with the Fusion drive, which works underneath the file system layer. And its not like deciding agains Fusion somehow allows you to avoid HFS+. Besides, he writes about files all the time, while Fusion works with blocks.

Anyway, a 'real' professional has a fast external drive (or a drive arrow), formatted with a reliable file system like ZFS. The Fusion is first and foremost designed to work as a main system drive.

 

[theSeb]

Sorry, but the article is entirely stupid. First of all, its baseless speculation (I don't see any tests), second, its full of contradictions. He is criticising HFS+ (quite rightly), but HFS+ does not have anything to do with the Fusion drive, which works underneath the file system layer. And its not like deciding agains Fusion somehow allows you to avoid HFS+. Besides, he writes about files all the time, while Fusion works with blocks.

Anyway, a 'real' professional has a fast external drive (or a drive arrow), formatted with a reliable file system like ZFS. The Fusion is first and foremost designed to work as a main system drive.

ZDNet is basically a MS shill site pretending to be full of "journalists". When the ZD Net commentators (look at the comments in the article) tear apart the "article", then you know it can be safely ignored.

Here is an article on Fusion that at least tries to base itself on reality and facts

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/10/more-on-fusion-drive-how-it-works-and-how-to-roll-your-own/

 

[TeeZee1000]

Soldierknowsbest review of the fusion drive

http://youtu.be/mdmo2aB5b8g

 

[themcfly]

So, is there any way you can split the fusion drive up and install mountain lion?

Has anybody do that and have a working 2012 iMac with SSD+HDD?

http://www.macworld.com/article/2015664/how-to-split-up-a-fusion-drive.html

This article, in the last 2 paragraphs, says that 2012 iMacs need a special build of Mountain Lion that can be downloaded only into recovery mode (but that is not an option because it requires you to fix the fusion drive before installing).

 

[motrek]

Quite a lot of things in a photographer's workflow can be sped up a lot by using a SSD, especially if they involve batch processing of files.
...
So do I - been writing code for over 20 years now, but I work on design and verification of enterprise systems these days.

It depends on which IDE is being used, but in general the storage sub-system makes very little difference to the build times, except for the very first build. As you've said, you have many little source files. A decent IDE, such as Xcode, caches all of those little source files aggressively into memory.

Compiling and building source code is CPU bound.
...

First of all, I didn't realize that so much of a photographer's workflow was resizing/watermarking massive numbers of photographs. I stand corrected.

Second, I am keenly aware that drive speed massively affects *my* XCode build cycle times because I bought a new Mac Mini 3 weeks ago and I was using it for a week just with the hard drive since I was waiting on a USB 3 enclosure for my SSD that I had mail-ordered. The difference is dramatic. I imagine you're right, that if you just sit there building the same thing over and over (or build it right after you opened it and thus it's in cache) then drive speed does not affect performance. This is certainly how I work sometimes--change a line of code, try again. But often I apparently work long enough between builds that everything required to build has been flushed from cache and it takes about 5 times longer. I should point out that a large portion of my build process is copying resources into the target app's bundle and installing it in the iOS simulator for testing. (There are things that affect a developers' productivity other than just the speed of compiling any given source file. Now that I mention that, the ability to quickly search a large amount of code for something is also invaluable.)

 

[Yougotcarved]

Second, I am keenly aware that drive speed massively affects *my* XCode build cycle times because I bought a new Mac Mini 3 weeks ago and I was using it for a week just with the hard drive since I was waiting on a USB 3 enclosure for my SSD that I had mail-ordered. The difference is dramatic. I imagine you're right, that if you just sit there building the same thing over and over (or build it right after you opened it and thus it's in cache) then drive speed does not affect performance. This is certainly how I work sometimes--change a line of code, try again. But often I apparently work long enough between builds that everything required to build has been flushed from cache and it takes about 5 times longer. I should point out that a large portion of my build process is copying resources into the target app's bundle and installing it in the iOS simulator for testing. (There are things that affect a developers' productivity other than just the speed of compiling any given source file. Now that I mention that, the ability to quickly search a large amount of code for something is also invaluable.)

Sorry I'm confused, what's the upshot of this? That SSD helps coding alot? Thats interesting to know being a programmer..

 

[torana355]

So, is there any way you can split the fusion drive up and install mountain lion?

Has anybody do that and have a working 2012 iMac with SSD+HDD?

http://www.macworld.com/article/2015664/how-to-split-up-a-fusion-drive.html

This article, in the last 2 paragraphs, says that 2012 iMacs need a special build of Mountain Lion that can be downloaded only into recovery mode (but that is not an option because it requires you to fix the fusion drive before installing).

With the Apple supplied fusion drives it automatically fuses them back together, however if you change out the standard HDD with an SSD you can keep the two SSDs separate I have a 512GB Samsung 830 SSD ready to go in to my iMac when it get here tomorrow. I will have 640GB of SSD for only 400 bucks rather then 1300!!!

 

[motrek]

Sorry I'm confused, what's the upshot of this? That SSD helps coding alot? Thats interesting to know being a programmer..

At least with my projects and workflow, yes, definitely.

----------

With the Apple supplied fusion drives it automatically fuses them back together, however if you change out the standard HDD with an SSD you can keep the two SSDs separate I have a 512GB Samsung 830 SSD ready to go in to my iMac when it get here tomorrow. I will have 640GB of SSD for only 400 bucks rather then 1300!!!

Why pay extra for the Fusion drive option if you are just going to change out the main drive anyway?

 

[torana355]

At least with my projects and workflow, yes, definitely.

----------



Why pay extra for the Fusion drive option if you are just going to change out the main drive anyway?

I wanted the extra 128GB blade SSD for my windows install After upgrading my 2008 iMac to a SSD there is no way im going back to spinning drives, fusion or not.

 

[barefeats]

ZDNet is basically a MS shill site pretending to be full of "journalists". When the ZD Net commentators (look at the comments in the article) tear apart the "article", then you know it can be safely ignored.

Here is an article on Fusion that at least tries to base itself on reality and facts

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/10/more-on-fusion-drive-how-it-works-and-how-to-roll-your-own/

Thanks for that. What is your opinion Lloyd Chamber's take?
http://macperformanceguide.com/macmini2012-dual-drives-vs-fusion.html

I ordered the 1TB Fusion for our 27" iMac in only out of curiosity on some long term testing. The only way I was able to get it to slow down was to duplicate a pair of HD videos totaling 11G. Then again (22G). Again (44G), etc., until the SSD was full. That's clearly an artificial event.

P.S. I created a Fusion volume on our Mac Pro using the 240G OWC Accelsior + 1TB WDC Velociraptor. Fun stuff.

 

[theSeb]

Thanks for that. What is your opinion Lloyd Chamber's take?
http://macperformanceguide.com/macmini2012-dual-drives-vs-fusion.html

I ordered the 1TB Fusion for our 27" iMac in only out of curiosity on some long term testing. The only way I was able to get it to slow down was to duplicate a pair of HD videos totaling 11G. Then again (22G). Again (44G), etc., until the SSD was full. That's clearly an artificial event.

P.S. I created a Fusion volume on our Mac Pro using the 240G OWC Accelsior + 1TB WDC Velociraptor. Fun stuff.

He raises some good points and he has some points that I disagree with, but Fusion drive is not really aimed at people like him. The same can be said for me. I see why Apple has done this, but it is not something that I need or want. But again, I have been mucking about computers since I was 8 and I have a computer science degree and I like to tell the computer what to do and how to do it.

Fusion benefits might not accrue

Fusion is a best case, not an average case. Many usage scenarios mean that users will simply see hard drive speeds.

Once the Apple Fusion SSD fills up, stuff overflows to the far slower hard drives. Then new stuff hits the hard drive. For batch-type jobs (download photos, process, move on to the next batch), chances are you will NEVER benefit from SSD speed, since the Fusion technology will never get around to moving those files to the SSD, except perhaps after you’ve finished with them!

That seems right based on what I've read. If the SSD is full, then you won't see benefits in these types of workflows. It is only during idle times that Fusion will move stuff around. But if we have already processed all of these files, why bother? It's quite likely that the user won't be doing much with them anymore.

Videos and music

There is no benefit to keeping video clips and music on a fast drive; their streaming rates are very slow. So if you watch the same video or listen to the same music repeatedly, chances are the Fusion SSD will waste its capacity for zero benefit.

This could be correct. I don't yet know if the Fusion algorithm is smart enough to differentiate between different file types and not move stuff like movies and music at all. I have a feeling that it does not.

Scratch disk for Photoshop users

For Photoshop users, there is no way to say “use the SSD for scratch”, since it is hidden from usage. Most likely, scratch writes will hit the far slower hard drive.

Depending on how full the SSD is (and I think it's safe to say that most people use more than 120 GB these days, especially those that are using apps like Photoshop) then this is correct. I see no Fusion benefit in this use scenario

Backup

On the assumption that the Fusion SSD occupies the 2nd drive bay, this means that no internal backup is possible— no internal Time Machine, no internal clone, etc.

Well the Fusion SSD occupies the propriety m-SATA like slot and there are no other places available to install another HDD, so the assumption is correct. I would never advocate using an internal drive for TM or as a clone of the main system drive so I completely disagree with the article there.

Complexity and reliability

The Fusion approach uses two drives. This can only be less reliable than a single drive or two separate drives, since failure of either drive in the Fusion volume means failure of the volume.

Indeed. Fusion is kind of a RAID 0 with some fancy algorithms in the CoreStorage layer to move stuff about based on various criteria that we don't fully understand yet. If one of those fails (and hard drives happen to be the most failure prone component) then all of the data is gone. Having Fusion basically doubles our chances of failure (using some really basic preschool mathematics)

For the average user the Fusion drive seems like a good compromise between speed and cost (although it's still overpriced, but we are talking about Apple here...), but I would have preferred that Apple leaves us with an option for 256/512 SSD + HDD in the iMac and Mini. Then if we want to create a Fusion drive, then we can. My 2011 Mini has a Vertex 3 SSD and a 750 GB WD Black HDD and I simply have symbolic links pointing to the hdd for folders like Movies and iTunes. Everything works seamlessly and I never have to consider on which volumes stuff is.

Obviously Apple believes that choices like these are bad and confusing. And they have a point if you spend two days reading some of the questions on forums like these. It's hard to criticise or praise Fusion until we have done extensive benchmarking or get an insight into how the algorithms work.

But, if we consider Apple's track record with first versions of anything (Time Machine is a good example), would I trust my data with version 1 of Fusion drive? No.

 

[Roller]

Yes necessarily! We don't need to use a Fusion drive to know how it works. 255GB of your 375GB used is stored on a regular, spinning hard disk. The software is "intelligently" decided which blocks are stored where, and that is all. During downtime those blocks are shifted around, but that still means that 355GB of data is on a spinning disk, which, in my eyes, is unforgivable in a Mac Product in nigh-2013.

I don't understand what you mean by "unforgivable." That any data is still stored on a spinning disk or that Apple charges too much for SSDs? In my view, the Fusion drive is an acceptable compromise until SSD prices drop further, which they will. I've been very satisfied with the 3TB Fusion drive so far, though time will tell if there are any problems with reliability. Meanwhile, I back it up diligently, as I did with all my prior HDDs.

 

[WilliamG]

I don't understand what you mean by "unforgivable." That any data is still stored on a spinning disk or that Apple charges too much for SSDs? In my view, the Fusion drive is an acceptable compromise until SSD prices drop further, which they will. I've been very satisfied with the 3TB Fusion drive so far, though time will tell if there are any problems with reliability. Meanwhile, I back it up diligently, as I did with all my prior HDDs.

I meant what I said! Data on a spinning disk is not cool!

 

[mfouks]

External vs. Internal drive for photos

I'm not a professional photographer but a serious amateur. I'm using a Nikon D800 with huge files (currently my recent photos are on external USB drive and the 1IB drive is full). I and am trying to figure out how best to store my photos when I get my new Mac. I have ordered the top of line 27 inch with a fusion drive, 3TB option. What do you think is the best option for storing the photos-keep on internal drive until I exceed the space which wouldn't take that long. Or keep all photos on external drive using some kind of Thunderbolt/Raid system. I use LR and a little bit of PS. Would editing be much faster using just the internal hard drive? If I were to go external what system would you recommend. I really appreciate any advice you can give me.

Marsha

I'm a bit amazed at people's inability to differentiate between what they *need* and what they (really, really) *want*. There are very few people who actually need all-SSD storage, but there are several here whose desperate want for it is breathtaking.

I've been running my 2009 i7 iMac with a FW800 SSD boot drive since I got it, with my data on the internal WD 1TB 7200 drive. The machine has always been very responsive (much better than booting from the internal). Having the OS and Applications on SSD has major benefits (even when handicapped by FW800), and certain other types of files also benefit greatly from SSD (databases, including things like Aperture/Lightroom catalogs). Typical user data, though, doesn't see much benefit from SSD. It's really the separating of OS tasks from user tasks that has the greatest benefit - once you do that, most other gains are fairly incremental.

So, given that, for the vast majority of users (even most of those vocally claiming that they MUST have pure SSD storage, because their NEED FOR SPEED can't be quenched, ever), Fusion Drive is a great solution. It gives 95% of the benefit of SSD for the great majority of tasks, while not sticking the user with the high $/GB cost of pure SSD storage. While pure SSD storage would certainly be nice to have, the costs for 1TB+ of pure SSD storage are prohibitive for the vast majority of users, but the cost for Fusion Drive is pretty reasonable, all things considered.

Personally, I'd be fine running my current setup for the foreseeable future if it wasn't for the slow speed of my external storage options (FW800/USB2). I'm a professional photographer with 2TB+ of photos on a RAID5 box that is seriously hobbled by FW800, so upgrading to a machine with Thunderbolt and USB3 is very attractive. Getting Fusion Drive and eliminating the kludgey (but functional) external SSD setup is a bonus.

 

[motrek]

Once the Apple Fusion SSD fills up, stuff overflows to the far slower hard drives. Then new stuff hits the hard drive. For batch-type jobs (download photos, process, move on to the next batch), chances are you will NEVER benefit from SSD speed, since the Fusion technology will never get around to moving those files to the SSD, except perhaps after you’ve finished with them!

This is absolutely wrong. If you read Anandtech's investigation/analysis of the Fusion drive software you will know that it keeps ~4GB free on the SSD, so any time you write to the volume it will be at SSD speeds, unless you have been writing data so quickly that space can't be freed up fast enough.

That means if you're a casual photographer who imports < 4GB of photos at a time then you will ALWAYS see SSD speeds, instead of never.

Maybe if you're a professional photographer with a high resolution camera shooting in RAW and taking hundreds/thousands of photos per shoot, you will not benefit from the Fusion drive that much, but that's a bit of a corner case.

EDIT: In fact, whoever wrote this article seems to have zero understanding of how the Fusion system works and almost all of the criticisms are absolutely wrong due to what I explained above.

 

[motrek]

I'm not a professional photographer but a serious amateur. I'm using a Nikon D800 with huge files (currently my recent photos are on external USB drive and the 1IB drive is full). I and am trying to figure out how best to store my photos when I get my new Mac. I have ordered the top of line 27 inch with a fusion drive, 3TB option. What do you think is the best option for storing the photos-keep on internal drive until I exceed the space which wouldn't take that long. Or keep all photos on external drive using some kind of Thunderbolt/Raid system. I use LR and a little bit of PS. Would editing be much faster using just the internal hard drive? If I were to go external what system would you recommend. I really appreciate any advice you can give me.

Depends on what you mean by editing. If you batch edit a bunch of files then it will be beneficial to keep them on the internal Fusion drive and/or put them on an external SSD connected via TB or USB 3.0.

But if you mean editing photos individually then you don't have to worry where the source photo is stored since the Fusion drive will save all your Photoshop swap files on the SSD.

If you are going to quickly fill up the internal 3GB drive then it sounds like you will need large external hard drives regardless of what recommendations you get here. USB 3.0 is more than enough to handle hard drive speeds; no need to go Thunderbolt for these.

 

[theSeb]

This is absolutely wrong. If you read Anandtech's investigation/analysis of the Fusion drive software you will know that it keeps ~4GB free on the SSD, so any time you write to the volume it will be at SSD speeds, unless you have been writing data so quickly that space can't be freed up fast enough.

That means if you're a casual photographer who imports < 4GB of photos at a time then you will ALWAYS see SSD speeds, instead of never.

Maybe if you're a professional photographer with a high resolution camera shooting in RAW and taking hundreds/thousands of photos per shoot, you will not benefit from the Fusion drive that much, but that's a bit of a corner case.

EDIT: In fact, whoever wrote this article seems to have zero understanding of how the Fusion system works and almost all of the criticisms are absolutely wrong due to what I explained above.

No, it is not absolutely wrong. If you read through the article from arstechnica you will see why. I unfortunately do not have the time to through this discussion in the amount of detail that I would like to right now.

 

[motrek]

No, it is not absolutely wrong. If you read through the article from arstechnica you will see why. I unfortunately do not have the time to through this discussion in the amount of detail that I would like to right now.

Saying that I'm wrong is pretty much worthless if you're not going to spend one word explaining what I'm wrong about or why. Here's a direct quote from the Ars Technica article that basically repeats what I posted:

"I repeatedly copied large files to the drive, and the results remained consistent—the copy operations would land on the SSD until it filled, then shift seamlessly over to the HDD and continue until completion. The SSD would then immediately move data off of itself until it had 4GB of free space. If I copied in a 2GB file, it would demote 2GB of data from somewhere else to the HDD; if I copied a 1GB file, it would demote 1GB. If I copied in 50GB, it would smoothly ingest all 50GB, and then demote 4GB of data off of the SSD."

In other words, if you are writing data to the drive slower than data is copied from the SSD to the HD, you will always see SSD speeds.

 

[mfouks]

thanks for advice. I edit one file at a time. I might be able to use the internal drive for a year or so before filling up. I do have two external 3TB WD USB2/3 drives now that I'm using so maybe I will use what I currently have and see how it goes. I have been going over all different options. Apple recommended using
a Pegasus 12TB R6 Raid drive and formatting it as raid 5(not sure what that is exactly). I would then put all of the photos on the external hard drive and have lots of space to back up all of the computer, not just photos. I liked this option because it would mean just one external drive and less clutter on the desk,give me lots of space and is supposed to be very fast. Another forum member also suggested this route and has been very happy with his Pegasus 8TB system. The disadvantages are the cost and even worse the reviews(on Apple and Amazon) which make it sound like there is a high chance of disk failure from time of purchase and poor customer support from that company. If you get a good one, it sounds like a really good system. So another option that I have been thinking about is the Caldigit T2 raid system (not available until next year). I could get 8TB for about $1,000 and from what I have heard they make excellent products with good customer service. I would probably use this as raid 1 to get an instant copy and yes I know I would still need a backup. To be honest I never thought about just using USB3 ( I'm not very technical) but liked the idea of the faster Thunderbolt and using my USB3 slots for other devices. However, perhaps I should look at another raid system that is USB3 if you say I wouldn't notice any speed difference. I do import a lot of images from the SD card so are you saying this wouldn't make a difference in speed whether or not I was using USB3 or thunderbolt?

Thanks, Marsha

Depends on what you mean by editing. If you batch edit a bunch of files then it will be beneficial to keep them on the internal Fusion drive and/or put them on an external SSD connected via TB or USB 3.0.

But if you mean editing photos individually then you don't have to worry where the source photo is stored since the Fusion drive will save all your Photoshop swap files on the SSD.

If you are going to quickly fill up the internal 3GB drive then it sounds like you will need large external hard drives regardless of what recommendations you get here. USB 3.0 is more than enough to handle hard drive speeds; no need to go Thunderbolt for these.

 

[chfilm]

I manually installed a SSD in my old 2010 Macbook Pro and merged it to a Fusion Drive with the built in HDD with some command line scripts. It works like a breeze! I can't wait for my 27" iMac to arrive, since my 2009 model is taking four times as long for whatever software to start up compared to the mbp now! Awesome

 

[motrek]

thanks for advice. I edit one file at a time. I might be able to use the internal drive for a year or so before filling up. I do have two external 3TB WD USB2/3 drives now that I'm using so maybe I will use what I currently have and see how it goes. I have been going over all different options. Apple recommended using
a Pegasus 12TB R6 Raid drive and formatting it as raid 5(not sure what that is exactly). I would then put all of the photos on the external hard drive and have lots of space to back up all of the computer, not just photos. I liked this option because it would mean just one external drive and less clutter on the desk,give me lots of space and is supposed to be very fast. Another forum member also suggested this route and has been very happy with his Pegasus 8TB system. The disadvantages are the cost and even worse the reviews(on Apple and Amazon) which make it sound like there is a high chance of disk failure from time of purchase and poor customer support from that company. If you get a good one, it sounds like a really good system. So another option that I have been thinking about is the Caldigit T2 raid system (not available until next year). I could get 8TB for about $1,000 and from what I have heard they make excellent products with good customer service. I would probably use this as raid 1 to get an instant copy and yes I know I would still need a backup. To be honest I never thought about just using USB3 ( I'm not very technical) but liked the idea of the faster Thunderbolt and using my USB3 slots for other devices. However, perhaps I should look at another raid system that is USB3 if you say I wouldn't notice any speed difference. I do import a lot of images from the SD card so are you saying this wouldn't make a difference in speed whether or not I was using USB3 or thunderbolt?

Thanks, Marsha

Frankly any multi-drive external system is going to be much more complicated, expensive, and less reliable than a single-drive solution. Regardless of cost, how do you back up that amount of data? Another multi-drive system? And are you technically conversant enough to handle a drive failure? Of course there are people who legitimately need this amount of storage and you may be one of them but if there's any way to avoid going that route, that's what I would do.

If you don't mind me asking, why do you need this phenomenal amount of storage that wasn't even really within an average consumer's grasp just a few years ago? Are you shooting huge numbers of pictures in RAW format and just keeping all of them? Aside from going through them all by hand and only keeping the best ones, do you need RAW quality for the older ones or can you convert them to JPEGs? Or possibly lower-resolution/lower-quality JPEGs? Do you need instant access to all of them or can you just offload the older ones to external drives and keep them as backups?

As for speed, if your bottleneck is copying files off of your SD card then that will max out at around 70-80 MB/s for the fastest cards, to my knowledge. Any hard drive connected in any way (except USB 2.0) will be more than fast enough to handle that data rate, so I wouldn't spend a second worry about USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, and/or RAID.

 

[mfouks]

you make some great points and no I am not technically conversant to handle a drive failure but I do have a friend that could help me. I am shooting with a Nikon D800, raw files. Before using this camera, I was fine with my current operation. I do shoot a huge numbers of raw photos and I need to do more editing and get rid of files that I don't need. I do go through each and every picture but I still need to delete more. I do want to keep the raw files of the best pictures though. I like having all of the photos available for the most recent years so I don't have to find them on older external drives but that might be a problem and is certainly something to think about.

I just got back from a photo workshop in Florida (4 days)- probably have 3 or 4 thousand pictures on the cards which I haven't been able to download to my old computer yet for lack of space. You are exactly right- how am I going to back up all of these files as my photo library increases? Fortunately storage will get larger and cheaper as time goes on. FYI I have 1TB worth of files now on an external drive which were taken from Feb 2012 through Oct 2012. The files before July on the old camera were much smaller.

Anyhow, you have given me a lot to think about. I think the best/cheapest solution will be to work on deciding which pictures are best, get rid of all the others and try to use up less space. If I could get away with just using the 3TB internal drive it would be great but I don't think that will happen. I have taken workshops on LR and pretty much everyone suggests using an external drive for the photos in order to avoid filling up the internal drive and slow down the operating system. I don't think that the caldigit raid solution would be too complex for me to handle. At some point I could also daisy chain another thunderbolt for backup purposes. I'm looking forward to at least being able to use USB3 in the meantime once the new computer arrives.

Motrek- your comments very much appreciated and give me lots to think about so thank you for your responses.

Frankly any multi-drive external system is going to be much more complicated, expensive, and less reliable than a single-drive solution. Regardless of cost, how do you back up that amount of data? Another multi-drive system? And are you technically conversant enough to handle a drive failure? Of course there are people who legitimately need this amount of storage and you may be one of them but if there's any way to avoid going that route, that's what I would do.

If you don't mind me asking, why do you need this phenomenal amount of storage that wasn't even really within an average consumer's grasp just a few years ago? Are you shooting huge numbers of pictures in RAW format and just keeping all of them? Aside from going through them all by hand and only keeping the best ones, do you need RAW quality for the older ones or can you convert them to JPEGs? Or possibly lower-resolution/lower-quality JPEGs? Do you need instant access to all of them or can you just offload the older ones to external drives and keep them as backups?

As for speed, if your bottleneck is copying files off of your SD card then that will max out at around 70-80 MB/s for the fastest cards, to my knowledge. Any hard drive connected in any way (except USB 2.0) will be more than fast enough to handle that data rate, so I wouldn't spend a second worry about USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, and/or RAID.

 

[raymond lin]

All drives risk failure, I mean how did we live with it for the past 30 years before SSD?

There is a reason why you back up your data.

 

[motrek]

you make some great points and no I am not technically conversant to handle a drive failure but I do have a friend that could help me. I am shooting with a Nikon D800, raw files. Before using this camera, I was fine with my current operation. I do shoot a huge numbers of raw photos and I need to do more editing and get rid of files that I don't need. I do go through each and every picture but I still need to delete more. I do want to keep the raw files of the best pictures though. I like having all of the photos available for the most recent years so I don't have to find them on older external drives but that might be a problem and is certainly something to think about.

I just got back from a photo workshop in Florida (4 days)- probably have 3 or 4 thousand pictures on the cards which I haven't been able to download to my old computer yet for lack of space. You are exactly right- how am I going to back up all of these files as my photo library increases? Fortunately storage will get larger and cheaper as time goes on. FYI I have 1TB worth of files now on an external drive which were taken from Feb 2012 through Oct 2012. The files before July on the old camera were much smaller.

Anyhow, you have given me a lot to think about. I think the best/cheapest solution will be to work on deciding which pictures are best, get rid of all the others and try to use up less space. If I could get away with just using the 3TB internal drive it would be great but I don't think that will happen. I have taken workshops on LR and pretty much everyone suggests using an external drive for the photos in order to avoid filling up the internal drive and slow down the operating system. I don't think that the caldigit raid solution would be too complex for me to handle. At some point I could also daisy chain another thunderbolt for backup purposes. I'm looking forward to at least being able to use USB3 in the meantime once the new computer arrives.

Motrek- your comments very much appreciated and give me lots to think about so thank you for your responses.

Sounds like you have a good handle on the issues involved. Just a couple of points.

1) Don't worry about filling up the internal drive. Having a lot of photos will not slow down anything. The operating system doesn't have to go through all your files every time it does anything. They will just sit on the drive doing nothing until you look at them. That being said I assume you will want 50-100GB of free space on the drive just to be able to import/manage your photos, which shouldn't be a problem with a 3TB drive.

2) Maybe you can keep your best photos in RAW format and convert the rest to JPEG, instead of going through and deciding which ones to delete by hand? I'm not a photographer but I assume there's an easy way to do this with most photo management software. Even if you set the JPEG quality level to 9 and keep the same resolution, the files will end up maybe a quarter of their current size or less. That might be the difference between an external RAID enclosure and being able to keep all your photos comfortably on the internal drive without having to spend a huge amount of time managing them.