by jamiedumont on 11/28/23, 10:44 AM with 2 comments
- I always find the debate on HN varied and interesting
- Various Reddit subs and forums have an obvious bias (TrueNAS, Synology, etc)
- Flaws in my thinking have been called out before on here - you lot aren't afraid to tell people they're wrong!
My situation:
- Pro-developer turned pro-photographer. I've got a good technical background to understand some of the solution.
- Currently have 1.5TB of images that I'm storing on an external 2TB SATA SSD (A1), mirrored (with SuperDuper) to another 2TB SSD (A2 - sent to a different location) and an external 2TB 2.5" HDD (A3) as fail-safe in a fire-proof box. A1 is also backed up to Backblaze B2 via Arq whenever it's connected.
- I cull image aggressively so growth in storage requirements has been slow until now (500GB p/a), but my work is increasing rapidly and with it the space I need (let's say 2 TB p/a as a worst case)
I'm going to hit the limits of this setup soon. Do I
A - buy another 2 SSDs and 1 HDD and continue the same setup (B1, B2 & B3)
B - replace this setup with larger SSDs and HDDs. (A1-3 but say 4TB?)
C - switch to HDD only and say use 3 external drives but @ 12TB+)
D - build/buy a NAS or DAS with RAID capabilities
When I finished development I repurposed my desktop as a TrueNAS (using the 2TB SATA SSDs from above) but it was obviously overkill (power & space requirements) for 2TB of storage only accessible via WiFi. I broke it down because of this and came up with the above setup. I'm not against building another NAS because I could automate much of my manual drive duplication, but I'll refit my home with ethernet beforehand!
I'll also likely be replacing my current M1 MacBook Pro (1TB) with a Mac Studio when the M3 models are released. Because my storage requirements are relatively low and well behind Moore's law (in a NAS context), I'm wondering whether it's better to take the money I'd spend on a NAS and drives and put it towards the expensive 8TB option with Arq backing up to B2. That would punt this decision down the road for a few years and leave me the option of building a NAS when I'm outgrowing the built-in storage on the Studio.
So...thoughts? Keep it simple with some more external SSDs or dive in with a NAS (most likely TrueNAS or ZFS on Linux)?
EDITED TO ADD:
E - do I just upload all the RAW images to B2 and let them do the hard work, and just keep the generated JPEGs locally?
by brudgers on 11/28/23, 3:34 PM
Buy a printer, print the pictures, throw the prints in a shoebox.
Then you can look at them and so can other people.
You can buy a lot of ink for the price of a speced Studio Mac.
And some nice shoes too.
Good luck.