OntheRez Offline Upload & Sell: On
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Chris Court wrote:
Thanks for the suggestions, Ian and Robert.
Contrary to what I wrote in my initial post, I actually keep my main image LIBRARY on an external OWC Mercury Elite box set up with a 12TB RAID 5 array. Also have this constantly backed up to Backblaze.
It's the Lightroom CATALOG file I want to get onto the fastest possible storage. I currently have it on the SSD, along with my apps, OS etc.
The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the main bottleneck in my current setup is probably the Library on the external RAID. I have somewhere around 5TB? of images, so putting all that on SSD's would be prohibitively expensive, but perhaps putting together a faster array running over Thunderbolt (rather than Firewire) would give me a nice boost?
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Chris,
Sounds like you have a good setup. RAID via T-Bolt definitely improves thru put, by 5TB is a real challenge. (Is your catalog running on SSD? Mine is on an internal 512 SSD and is not a bottleneck. Or stated another way, what machine are you running and can you upgrade it to a SSD? (1TB SSDs are now available, but they sure ain't cheap NAS is one possibility though you'd need to be running very fast Ethernet - probably on at least two ports - for it not to be a bottleneck. I think if I were faced with the challenge I'd probably go to two databases with different catalogs. I suspect you don't need instant access to all 5TB. If not then splitting into current and non-active could set you up with an all SSD RAID 0 active file DB using a TB 4 bay enclosure. (Rigorously backed up.) Still not cheap, but - if you can live with a subset of your files - it should give you as fast as thru put as possible without going into exotic and quite expensive solutions. As noted there are a few UNIX tricks that could help, but you'd really have to know what you're doing, and I don't think they would provide the thru put you need.
I ran FireWire before T-Bolt and the newer (particularly spec 2) is dramatically faster. So I guess your choices are to stuff a T-box with the fastest platters you can get or split the database. You'll have to decide how your workflow would handle it best.
Robert
Wish I had the magic pill, but I believe we are at a junction in computing where are ability to collect ever increasing sized files into growing but not keeping up storage devices. We need a break through and I suspect the first response will be larger and more affordable SSDs.
Question. How did you ever get your first backup to BackBlaze? I've wanted to use their service, but at the upload speed available to me (we only have joking say we run on barbwire in this tiny town), I calculated it would take about 2.5 months to get my ~500GB uploaded.
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