If you just started bracketing for HDR, you’ve no doubt you are starting to think more about storage and hard drives. Here’s something that just happened and I’ll share it in case you didn’t know yourself and hopefully save you the pain I just went through. It’s logical, but I missed the logic myself.
Don’t buy 2 or more identical hard drives (exact same model) from the same company at the same time. If the company received a batch of bad drives from the manufacturer, then you’ll be buying into that bad batch (this just happened to me). So either buy a variety of drives at once from one wholesaler or buy the same drive from multiple sites.
Lesson learned the hard way for me. I lost my main OS drive a couple weeks ago. I quickly ordered two highly rated hard drives from Newegg.com and had them rushed out to me. I used one as new OS drive and one as new data drive (internal). Both failed in the first week of use. Lesson learned. I should have bought two different drives at once as a bare minimum.
I have been told that most drives will either fail in the first 100 hours or after several years. I had heard various take offs of the early failures, but this is the first time it ever happened to me personally. Never a new drive, its always been after I beat the heck out of one for years.
Good news is that when I tweeted this mishap, I found out about Macsales.com from a few folks who took the time to email me. Because I’m both PC and Mac based I had always used Newegg for purchasing computer parts, but I’ll now try OWC out as well.
THE REAL RAW
I’ve ripped through close to 40 hard drives in about 5 years. All but six drives are still alive and working. They are mostly retired to USB external enclosure kits I’d put together and house them in for data retrieval once I’ve nearly filled them up as internal drives in either my MacPro or PCs. In the land of HDR, you’ll rip through hard drives.
For me personally, the true raw file is the merged .HDR/.EXR/.PSD(32bit) file. This may shock some of you, but for all my architectural shoots I destroy the raws about a month after the shoot is delivered. I usually do the following…
Merge all brackets and save as a 32 bit file. I lean towards .EXR, but if I did the merging in Photoshop I’ll first save a 32 bit .PSD file and then save as to a .EXR file. I do all my tonemapping and editing and about a month after the finals are delivered, I delete the RAWs from that shoot and keep only the finals the client got and the .HDR/.EXR/.PSD(32bit). Those 32 bit files are my “real raws” which I can go back and reprocess again and again.
Sometimes I’ll keep a middle exposure RAW just as a reference file, but not always. When shooting interiors even the middle exposure is not very worth while as a single raw because you’ll still have deep shadows and blown out highlights in that same file no matter how much you edit it in LightRoom or Aperture.
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RAID. That’s part of what you need. I’ve got a 1TB RAID1, a couple of 500s for scratch, misc, and the OS, and a 2TB to back everything up to..
Michael: I can identify with the hard drive thing. In my case I had a ‘daisy chain’ of miscellaneous drives all flopped across my workspace. It was a disaster waiting to happen. I finally bit the bullet and bought the Drobo FS. You can add up to 5 drives to it as you require more space. Start with say three (any brand, doesn’t matter)and then just plug in what ever you need later. It can be configured to withstand up to 2 simultaneous drive failures. It stores up to 15TB and warns you when you need to replace/add a drive. Very slick. It installed so easily that I thought that I’d done something wrong!
Anyway in spite of the added cost I don’t worry about my storage quite so much. I know this sounds like an ad but I’m not affiliated in any way with Drobo (Data Robotics).
Have you thought any about using an external backup service. To assist in the recovery if the unfortunate may happen? Any thoughts on Carbonite, Backblaze?
Michael
I definitely need a better external backup system. I never thought I’d be where I am today when I started shooting HDR. Never gave it enough thought early on and as time progressed. Just been feeding G5, then MacPro’s internal drives and would backup with externals for each shoot as I went. So I’ve got a lot of data on two sets of drives.
I only lost a days worth of data in the recent loss. I’m always backing up as I go. I had finished late one night and too tired to wait the 30mins to backup (it was 4am and I was wiped). Oh well.
I’ve got stacks of 1 terabyte drives folks. Stacks. I rip through them like there is no tomorrow.
I didn’t mention I shoot HD video from time to time so that just adds to the storage woes.