Question What type of HHD for photo storage... a NAS drive? Enterprise drive? 5400rpm drive?

[NEEDphotoRIG]

Am building a new photo editing rig. NO gaming or video processing. As a recent retiree and photo enthusiast (early adopter of digital imaging) I have terabytes of old digital files I want to store on my new rig. Here is my new set up:
Drive A) 1 TB Kingston KC3000 for OS and programs
Drive B) 2TB N850X 2 TB for current projects I am working on
Drive C) 250GB Samsung 2.5" SATA for Lightroom catalogue and Windows scratch file
Drive D: An as yet unpurchased HDD
After about 2-3 months I will transfer photo files off of Drive B for long term storage on to Drive D, a large terabyte HHD that I plan to purchase. (I will also have external backup).
It's been 11 years since I've purchased a HDD and the landscape seems to have changed.
I'd like something between 16-20 TBs. There seem to be a dearth of consumer HDDs nowadays. I see sales on NAS drives and Enterprise drives. It seems like they can be used on a home PC. Some people discourage them because they seem to be always on, are noisier and consume more power. Others suggest they are better quality than the consumer HDDs. I will be only writing to them maybe once a month...though I may access them to work on a photo I'd taken previously. This probably might happen ten times a month when people purchase prints from me.

I'm wondering if the slower 5400 rpm drives are better for my usage - they are quieter I assume and hopefully cheaper. And if I rarely access the info on them I doubt if I care if the disks take a few seconds longer the 20 times a month I'll access them.

Conversely I wonder if the NAS/Enterprise drives will be a waste of energy consumption if they never idle down - do they never idle down?
What are your thoughts??

 

[tennis2]

5400-5900rpm is typical. Many 7200rpm drives have exited the market as their performance "benefit" is eclipsed by an order of magnitude by SSDs.

NAS drives are generally more resistant to vibrations caused by housing/running multiple drives in an enclosure. Not entirely necessary in your case.

Enterprise HDDs are likely unnecessary for personal consumer use. Especially if/since you have a backup plan in place.

 

[Bob.B]

Am building a new photo editing rig. NO gaming or video processing. As a recent retiree and photo enthusiast (early adopter of digital imaging) I have terabytes of old digital files I want to store on my new rig. Here is my new set up:
Drive A) 1 TB Kingston KC3000 for OS and programs
Drive B) 2TB N850X 2 TB for current projects I am working on
Drive C) 250GB Samsung 2.5" SATA for Lightroom catalogue and Windows scratch file
Drive D: An as yet unpurchased HDD
After about 2-3 months I will transfer photo files off of Drive B for long term storage on to Drive D, a large terabyte HHD that I plan to purchase. (I will also have external backup).
It's been 11 years since I've purchased a HDD and the landscape seems to have changed.
I'd like something between 16-20 TBs. There seem to be a dearth of consumer HDDs nowadays. I see sales on NAS drives and Enterprise drives. It seems like they can be used on a home PC. Some people discourage them because they seem to be always on, are noisier and consume more power. Others suggest they are better quality than the consumer HDDs. I will be only writing to them maybe once a month...though I may access them to work on a photo I'd taken previously. This probably might happen ten times a month when people purchase prints from me.

I'm wondering if the slower 5400 rpm drives are better for my usage - they are quieter I assume and hopefully cheaper. And if I rarely access the info on them I doubt if I care if the disks take a few seconds longer the 20 times a month I'll access them.

Conversely I wonder if the NAS/Enterprise drives will be a waste of energy consumption if they never idle down - do they never idle down?
What are your thoughts?

Would it fit your needs to just get a dock with an on/off switch?

When you need it turn it on when your finished turn it off.

 

[kanewolf]

Am building a new photo editing rig. NO gaming or video processing. As a recent retiree and photo enthusiast (early adopter of digital imaging) I have terabytes of old digital files I want to store on my new rig. Here is my new set up:
Drive A) 1 TB Kingston KC3000 for OS and programs
Drive B) 2TB N850X 2 TB for current projects I am working on
Drive C) 250GB Samsung 2.5" SATA for Lightroom catalogue and Windows scratch file
Drive D: An as yet unpurchased HDD
After about 2-3 months I will transfer photo files off of Drive B for long term storage on to Drive D, a large terabyte HHD that I plan to purchase. (I will also have external backup).
It's been 11 years since I've purchased a HDD and the landscape seems to have changed.
I'd like something between 16-20 TBs. There seem to be a dearth of consumer HDDs nowadays. I see sales on NAS drives and Enterprise drives. It seems like they can be used on a home PC. Some people discourage them because they seem to be always on, are noisier and consume more power. Others suggest they are better quality than the consumer HDDs. I will be only writing to them maybe once a month...though I may access them to work on a photo I'd taken previously. This probably might happen ten times a month when people purchase prints from me.

I'm wondering if the slower 5400 rpm drives are better for my usage - they are quieter I assume and hopefully cheaper. And if I rarely access the info on them I doubt if I care if the disks take a few seconds longer the 20 times a month I'll access them.

Conversely I wonder if the NAS/Enterprise drives will be a waste of energy consumption if they never idle down - do they never idle down?
What are your thoughts?

The key thing about storage is the 3-2-1 rule. 3 copies on 2 different physical devices plus 1 copy off-site. The off-site copy protects against fire, theft, flood, etc.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Get either Western Digital Red Pros (they're CMR based) or Seagate IronWolf drives (they're all CMR based).

Regarding hard drives shutting down, they don't shut down automatically by themselves. The OS tells them to shut down after a certain period of inactivity. The only thing that they will do is park the heads if there's nothing going on. Regarding my usage, I configured my NAS to shut down the drives after 20 minutes of inactivity. The cost though is it takes about 10 or so seconds for them to spin up and become responsive when I want to access them, but I don't do it enough times for this to be a bother.

 

[NEEDphotoRIG]

Would it fit your needs to just get a dock with an on/off switch?

When you need it turn it on when your finished turn it off.

A dock sounds like a great idea....but any time I looked at docks they either look cheap and unreliable or they have 6gb or 8 tb limits...are there any good quality docks?

 

[NEEDphotoRIG]

The key thing about storage is the 3-2-1 rule. 3 copies on 2 different physical devices plus 1 copy off-site. The off-site copy protects against fire, theft, flood, etc.

I just have 2 copies of the files on my PC - one in desktop externals and external copy at my sister's house...

 

[NEEDphotoRIG]

Get either Western Digital Red Pros (they're CMR based) or Seagate IronWolf drives (they're all CMR based).

Regarding hard drives shutting down, they don't shut down automatically by themselves. The OS tells them to shut down after a certain period of inactivity. The only thing that they will do is park the heads if there's nothing going on. Regarding my usage, I configured my NAS to shut down the drives after 20 minutes of inactivity. The cost though is it takes about 10 or so seconds for them to spin up and become responsive when I want to access them, but I don't do it enough times for this to be a bother.

I knew the consumer HDDs shut off after a while. I wasn't sure that Enterprise or NAS drives shut off after a period of inactivity. I just assumed they were for use on enterprise servers that were reading/writing constantly. i was worried that these NAS drives were thus unsuitable for my usage where I would only be writing or reading off of them maybe 20 times a month.
But if NAS drives are the only large capacity drives I guess I have no choice.

 

[USAFRet]

A dock sounds like a great idea....but any time I looked at docks they either look cheap and unreliable or they have 6gb or 8 tb limits...are there any good quality docks?

I have this (no longer available)
6 yrs old, zero issues.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0099TX7O4
Even though it says "10TB", the original I have said 8TB, and I've used it with 14/16TB drives with zero issue.

I imagine this would work well:
https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-External-Docking-Station-EC-UBLB/dp/B075GJ3P3B

 

[NEEDphotoRIG]

Thanks USAFret....I've wondered about these docking stations for decades now as I do have old HDDs lying around that I've never gotten around to using for storage (rainy day project for retirement)...whenever I read the 1 star revues I usually defer it for the next rainy day. THANKS

 

[faalin]

Get either Western Digital Red Pros (they're CMR based) or Seagate IronWolf drives (they're all CMR based).

Regarding hard drives shutting down, they don't shut down automatically by themselves. The OS tells them to shut down after a certain period of inactivity. The only thing that they will do is park the heads if there's nothing going on. Regarding my usage, I configured my NAS to shut down the drives after 20 minutes of inactivity. The cost though is it takes about 10 or so seconds for them to spin up and become responsive when I want to access them, but I don't do it enough times for this to be a bother.

This, I run 5 8TB seagate Ironwolfs in my NVR, one in the Ubiquiti Dream machine and 4 in the Ubiquiti NVR. and i have 3 18TB WD Red Pro in my server for storage/backups, with 2 18TB WD Red Pro drives in my computer. Replaced 3 6TB WD Red Pro drives in my desktop with the 2 18TB drives.


6TB's ive had for 5 years + gave them to my brother so hes using them now.
8TB's ive had for 3 years, were in my server as storage but since upgrading have move to my NVR
18TB's had for just under a year but havent had any trouble with them. 1 runs my steam library which is just short of 6TB, add in battle.net, origin, epic, and all of my old games i ripped to ISO's. There's always some sort of read or write happening with the drive between playing games or doing game updates.

 

[NEEDphotoRIG]

This, I run 5 8TB seagate Ironwolfs in my NVR, one in the Ubiquiti Dream machine and 4 in the Ubiquiti NVR. and i have 3 18TB WD Red Pro in my server for storage/backups, with 2 18TB WD Red Pro drives in my computer. Replaced 3 6TB WD Red Pro drives in my desktop with the 2 18TB drives.


6TB's ive had for 5 years + gave them to my brother so hes using them now.
8TB's ive had for 3 years, were in my server as storage but since upgrading have move to my NVR
18TB's had for just under a year but havent had any trouble with them. 1 runs my steam library which is just short of 6TB, add in battle.net, origin, epic, and all of my old games i ripped to ISO's. There's always some sort of read or write happening with the drive between playing games or doing game updates.

Excuse my ignaorance...what is steam library (I just learned what water cooling was - LOL)

 

[NEEDphotoRIG]

I notice the WD Reds have double the cache of the Seagate Iron Wolves...does that make them faster in read speeds? I know how cache works with CPUs but not disks.

 

[hotaru.hino]

I notice the WD Reds have double the cache of the Seagate Iron Wolves...does that make them faster in read speeds? I know how cache works with CPUs but not disks.

No. For read speeds to be affected by cache you need to have accessed the same data multiple times. I feel like the cache is more for writes, so small write appear to be done sooner. But once you exceed the cache size, the write speed tanks to whatever the HDD is capable of.

 

[tennis2]

I feel like the cache is more for writes, so small write appear to be done sooner. But once you exceed the cache size, the write speed tanks to whatever the HDD is capable of.

This is my understanding as well.
You ever copy a [large-ish] file, wait a few seconds (for Windows to pull/cache the data into RAM(?)), then paste it onto a HDD? Notice the write speed is pretty fast for the first bit (1 or 2 seconds)? That's the HDD's cache. Once the cache is full, write speeds drop to "steady state"

 

[USAFRet]

I feel like the cache is more for writes, so small write appear to be done sooner.

Yes.
WRiting to the drive writes to the cache first (fast), and then it gets dumped to the platters.

 

[faalin]

Excuse my ignaorance...what is steam library (I just learned what water cooling was - LOL)

Steam is an online store where you can buy games from. They have an app you install on your computer that keeps track of every game you have bought (from them) and it allows you do download and install the game to your computer. You dont have to keep track of a CD/DVD or the cd key and it install the latest updates/patches for the game as well.

 

[Misgar]

I agree with Kanewolf's comment about the need for a 3-2-1 backup strategy, especially if your computer is connected to the internet. If image files become encrypted by Ransomware, you'll be glad you made backup copies and kept them isolated (physically disconnected) from your editing system. As per the OP, I have a large collection of digital images, including 40,000+ RAW scans of Kodachrome and Velvia using a Nikon LS-5000ED slide scanner plus over 200,000 RAW/JPG files from DSLRs. I'd hate for all this hard work to vanish due to a virus attack or a catastrophic computer hardware failure (I've had two lightning strikes on my house which have fried several routers and network switches, but luckily not the computers).

I have multiple copies of image files on four working PCs housing multiple hard drives, plus two old HP ML350P Gen 8 servers with ECC RAM running RAID-Z2 TrueNAS Core multi-disk arrays (two drives can fail in each array with no data loss). I have a slowly growing collection of old 1TB, 2TB and 3TB hard disks which have failed over the years, but a few redundant drives are more than 20 years and still work fine (my first disk was a 30MB 5.25in ST506 RLL drive). The Backblaze web site is a useful source of modern hard drive failure rates.

Nowadays I check carefully before buying a hard disk to make sure it uses PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) also known as CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording). Although PMR/CMR drives tend to be slightly more expensive, I no longer buy SMR (Shingle Magnetic Recoding) drives which are often used in external USB3 portable drives. Check out the pros and cons of PMR/CMR vs SMR online and the WD Red NAS drive SMR obfuscation a few years back. The problem with the previous generation of WD Red SMR drives in RAID predominated in FreeNAS/TrueNAS systems, but it affected a large number of people. If you're not using RAID don't worry, but I think WD should have warned about prolonged re-silvering times (days vs hours) with their Red (SMR) NAS drives in some RAID systems.

When searching eBay for brand new bargains, I prefer to buy Enterprise drives because of their superior build quality and higher endurance rating. I also buy WD Purple video recorder drives (brand new) because I know they are PMR/CMR and not SMR. As for drive spindle speed, 5,400, 5,900 or 7,200RPM, it hardly matters for archival image storage. Your faster NVMe / SATA SSDs will be used for editing work.

In the past, I saved files to 25GB BluRay WORM discs (Write Once Read Many) to protect against virus attacks. These days I use 800GB LTO4 (Linear Tape Open) cartridges which are available for a few dollars/pounds/euros on the second-hand market. If you slide the write protect tab on the tape cartridge to the read-only position, they're "safe" against virus attack. I'd like a new LTO6, 7 or 8 drive for archives but they're too expensive for me. Write protected tapes and optical disks are far less susceptible to ransomware attack than a portable USB3 drive permanently attached to your PC.

My advice is to keep multiple copies of irreplaceable files and make sure they're not all stored in one place. Virus attack, hardware failure, fire, flood, etc could destroy all your files if they're stored in (or attached to) a single computer. You never know when a hard disk will fail (even with Hard Disk Sentinel monitor running). Spread the risk. Make another copy.

 

[Misgar]

To answer some of NEEDphotoRIG's original questions:-

1). Can you use NAS / Enterprise drives in home rigs. The simple answer is Yes, provided they are SATA (Serial ATA) and not SAS (Serial Attached SCSI). I use a mixture of SATA and SAS drives, but you'll need a PCI Express RAID or HBA Controller Card for use with SAS drives. These can be picked up cheap (for 6Gb/s cards) on eBay, but I suggest staying with SATA drives for the time being. There are a lot of second hand ex-server SAS drives for sale on eBay, but they won't work in a home PC without a compatible controller card.

2). Drive power use. Despite having systems with up to 10 hard disks, I choose to leave them running all the time. Some people claim that power cycling hard drives unnecessarily reduces their life expectancy. If you have only one hard disk in your system, powering it down will not result in huge savings. The data sheet for a 16TB Seagate IronWolf drive shows the Average Operating Power as 7.3W; the Idle Average is 5.3W and the Standby/Sleep Mode consumption is 0.8W. If you think that saving 4.5W (5.3 minus 0.8W) is going to make a huge saving on your electricity bill, by all means enable power saving. Drives tend to go to sleep because the Operating System tells them to power down. I dive into advanced settings in Microsoft Windows and disable the default 20 minute power down option for hard disks.

3). Drive quality. If I can find a brand new Enterprise or NAS drive on eBay for not much more than a Commercial drive, I'd pick an Enterprise / NAS drive every time. Low capacity Commercial drives are built down to a price and tend to have shorter warranties. Enterprise / NAS drives can be considerably more expensive, but savings can be made if you're willing to buy from eBay. Always check the seller's rating on eBay.

4). Drive noise. I can't say I've noticed any difference in the noise coming from modern Commercial drives versus Enterprise/NAS drives, because the fans in my computers keep things cool and drown out the noise from the drives. Unless you intend to sleep in the same room as the computer when it's running, I doubt you'll hear any noise from a modern drive. Twenty years ago drives were much noisier and you could hear the heads "seeking" during data transfers. 10,000 and 15,000RPM SCSI server drives were also quite loud and hot.

5). Drive capacity. Although you could puchase a single 16 to 20TB hard disk, they're still quite expensive and you might find two 8 or 10GB drives are cheaper. There's also the concern that with only one drive, if it fails you can't work on any archived files until you get a new drive. With two smaller capacity drives, the time take to restore lost files from backup will be halved (assuming the other drive is still working). The 16TB IronWolf has a maximum transfer rate of 210MB/s, but this speed will drop to 105MB/s on the innermost tracks. It could take up to 2 days to fill a 16TB drive with data.

6). External USB Drives. Hard disks fitted inside in commercial USB3 portable (2.5in) and desktop (3.5in) drives are often SMR, with slower write times especially when files are deleted and added. Lack of ventilation inside the plastic housing increases running temperature of hard disks to the point where I become unhappy, i.e. mid 50's Centigrade. If you "shuck" the hard disk out of a USB housing and install it in a well ventilated computer case, the drive temperature will drop by 20 degrees Centigrade to the mid 30's. Another potential source of trouble with USB3 is file corruption, if the data cable is too long e.g. 3ft (1m). I use short good quality 30cm cables with my Kingston FCR-HS4 card reader when transferring image files from Compact Flash and Secure Digital memory cards. After copying, I perform a lengthy byte-by-byte comparison of the files on the computer wih those on the memory cards to check for corruption (using a program called FreeFileSync). It's not always sufficient to perform a quick check to see if the file names and size are the same.