Home · Register · Join Upload & Sell

Moderated by: Fred Miranda

New fredmiranda.com Mobile Site

New Feature: SMS Notification alert

New Feature: Buy & Sell Watchlist

FM Forums | General Gear-talk | Join Upload & Sell

Archive 2013 · hard drives and pc capacity

ranankay
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · hard drives and pc capacity

I have 5 external hard drives I've accumulated over the past couple of years, all connected to my PC for storage of my photos. I just recently bought Lightroom 5 and and now I guess I should upload all my pics into the [catalog] so I can call up and work on the image i want. Is this going to give me problems as long as I only use one hard drive at a time . I have had to hook up a couple of adapters that have 3 USB connections for extra plugins. Will lightroom handle this much capacity.
How should I go about all this ? Any and all help is really appreciated.
thanks Ran

Dec 02, 2013 at 03:38 PM

15Bit
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · hard drives and pc capacity

LR will handle as much capacity as you can throw at it, but it does prefer if the photos are "live" all the time.

It sounds to me like your data organisation is a problem. You don't mention what the capacity of the drives is, but my recommendation would be to just buy one or two large (3 or 4TB) drives and install them directly into the PC. Use the internal drives as your main file storage and use the externals for backups.

Dec 02, 2013 at 03:59 PM

ranankay
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · hard drives and pc capacity

They are 1T - 2T - 3T thats just about what I do now ,I use them as storage and pull into the pscs5 and LR5 as needed.Thanks

Dec 02, 2013 at 06:29 PM

Brit-007
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · hard drives and pc capacity

But you have had the drives for years so they are getting old. Drives do not last forever and there is no warning when they will go out. If you are really serious you should consider some form of backup in case of problems. There are many many threads about both help for drive failures and also fo backup solutions.

Dec 04, 2013 at 04:59 PM

ranankay
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · hard drives and pc capacity

Thanks Brit

Dec 04, 2013 at 05:59 PM

rbrockman
Offline
•
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · hard drives and pc capacity

I'd recommend you split your data/images into different catalogs. This improves LR performance and you can create a catalog for each drive if you intend to keep the additional drives. I tend to do a new catalog per year of images.

Dec 17, 2013 at 11:20 PM

Ian.Dobinson
Offline
• • • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · hard drives and pc capacity

rbrockman wrote:
I'd recommend you split your data/images into different catalogs. This improves LR performance and you can create a catalog for each drive if you intend to keep the additional drives. I tend to do a new catalog per year of images.

Personally I would NOT do this . separate catalogues could get to be a pain . I can understand using individual cats if you shoot stuff that has no crossover at all . Ie weddings etc . you would have a Catalouge for the client that has all their stuff and none else's in it .
But if its you general personal stuff over a number of years then I find its better to have them all in one Catalogue . (the actual images can be on any drive) . that way its easy to flick back and get images from along time back . if you had multiple catalogues you could be forever going from one cat to another trying to find stuff you wanted .

Lightroom will import images and can be told to leave them in the current location. if you have multiple drives then yes to get to the actual image the drives will need to be connected for LR to 'see' them . but with LR5 you can have LR build Smart Previews . these allow you to work on images even when the real RAW (or jpeg) file is not present . very handy for most PP work other than Noise reduction and Sharpening (you should work on the whole file for those )

Dec 18, 2013 at 04:11 AM

Paul Mo
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · hard drives and pc capacity

Question #1 - What is the total size (in gigabytes or terabytes) of your image collection?

Dec 18, 2013 at 06:29 AM

ranankay
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · hard drives and pc capacity

I'm thinking I'll need to have just one catalog,because I list things by client ,trip ,location, or some other name. I have approximately 5/6 Tera-bites of images total. the oldest EHD is about 3 years old , most images having been transferred from my DVD's to the HD's. I guess I could just disconnect the HD from the computer and only attach it to find images needed at the time. I'll add to my LR catalog as I go on new shoots and as I need to locate from my HD I can add them at that time as well,what do you think?

Dec 18, 2013 at 10:51 AM

Paul Mo
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · hard drives and pc capacity

It's a personal choice, but if it were me with that many images not only would I carefully cull the non-keepers, I'd start to price RAID solutions and backups - even Drobo.

I'd think long and hard about future capacity and possibly save toward a 16TB (for example) tower along the lines of these http://www.ncix.com/search/?categoryid=0&q=raid+10

Dec 18, 2013 at 01:40 PM

ranankay
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · hard drives and pc capacity

Thanks Paul

Dec 18, 2013 at 01:44 PM

15Bit
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · hard drives and pc capacity

I agree with Paul - with that sort of data volume you need to start thinking a little more professionally with respect to storage and backups. Either a Drobo or similar purpose designed RAID system, or an old PC stuffed with hard disks and running FreeNAS.

Dec 18, 2013 at 04:41 PM

ranankay
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · hard drives and pc capacity

WEll I guess I don't know as much as I think i did lol, I have heard of Raid ,but thats about it , I just been taking to many pics >

Dec 18, 2013 at 05:23 PM

Ian.Dobinson
Offline
• • • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #14 · p.1 #14 · hard drives and pc capacity

the guys are right , you probably should be thinking about a long term strategy now and go over the top on storage . or at least have the capacity to increase the storage size easily in the future

the bare minimum you should have as a backup now is a full backup copy of your data on site and another copy off site .
the off site copy leaves you a copy that you can recover if you have some sort of on site desaster (fire / flood/ theft etc)
you can rotate the backup drives . that way while the off site version is slightly older, as long as you rotate on a regular basis you at least keep all but the very latest data safe.

Dec 18, 2013 at 07:37 PM

ranankay
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #15 · p.1 #15 · hard drives and pc capacity

Just exactly what is a raid system,or drobo?

Dec 18, 2013 at 07:55 PM

ranankay
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #16 · p.1 #16 · hard drives and pc capacity

Thanks for the link that helps I'll google all this up and learn . thanks folks

Dec 18, 2013 at 08:04 PM

Michael White
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #17 · p.1 #17 · hard drives and pc capacity

My suggestion is pickup the digital negative by Jeff Schewe it covers the organization and ingesting of files in to lr5 nice thing about lr5 the file doesn't have to be active to edit it if you use a certin setting for offline files. It was the best book I read on ingesting and organizing files in lr5 more detail and complete than the others I've read. His second book covers the develope and print modules.

Dec 21, 2013 at 10:40 PM

ranankay
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #18 · p.1 #18 · hard drives and pc capacity

Thanks Michael

Dec 22, 2013 at 07:24 AM

F1rebrand
Offline
•
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #19 · p.1 #19 · hard drives and pc capacity

Agree with the suggestions of merging the data into a larger raid array. But to keep it all simple with what you have you can use the preview and offline catalogue abilities of lightroom 5 and then organize each hdd by some specific criteria (e.g. date range). Then when you pull up a file from the lightroom catalogue that you need and see the date you'll be able to pick the specific file option.

The main thing with the Raid solution is that eventually one of those drives IS going to fail and you'll have lost it all. With a good raid setup you'll loose the drive but not the data.

Mar 03, 2014 at 11:49 PM

ranankay
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #20 · p.1 #20 · hard drives and pc capacity

Thanks guys ,Guess I'll go on a raid ..

Mar 04, 2014 at 06:25 AM


FM Forums \| General Gear-talk \| Join Upload & Sell

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.