p.1 #1 · Need advice for a fast network drive with multiple users
Dear fellow photographers,
My wife and I have started our photography business and have our own existing LAN/local network which we've used to transfer files between each other. We're currently running an old Motorola 10/100 wireless router and just using our internal hard drives and transferring files back and forth.
The problem is we are running out of space to hold our files and need to invest in some files for redudancy/backups.
We are now in the market for some extra storage and would like some advice. We both use Lightroom and Photoshop and both work on RAW files together.
Thus, we wanted to store our master RAW files on a disk somewhere, where we can both work on them together. We're using Lightroom, which can write .xmp file to our own disk.
We realize that we may have to plunk down some cash to make this setup work.
1. What additions to our home network should we incorporate in order to both work off of 1 drive together. Please keep in mind we're likely to purchase additional eqiupment for redudancy (2 drives, or RAID).
2. What type of drives would be fast enough for us to work on RAWs together? Are drives such as Lacie BigDisk Gigabit, Western Digital World Edition II fast enough for our purposes?
3. Will we need to upgrade to gigabit on everything and how much of a difference will we notice?
4. How can we store our own edits? Can Lightroom right .XMP onto a networked drive? Is there a better way for 2 photographers to work on the same set of files together at their own computer?
p.1 #2 · Need advice for a fast network drive with multiple users
Sounds like a NAS storage device will fit your needs.
Infrant makes one of the better storgae devices without getting into full blown corporate level range of equipment. Their ReadyNAS+ is very well designed and has good performance for such a device. More info here.
Keep in mind that there are many such devices available from different manufacturers. The important things to consider are flexibility in configuration, reliability, and performance. In all respects Infrant is one of the better units.
Keep in mind that performance will vary based on what device you use for storage. The order from fastest to slowest would be;
1: Internal hard drive or external directly connect e-SATA storage. (non-shared)
2: External Firewire 800, followed by Firewire 400. (non-shared)
3: External USB 2.0 storage. (non-shared)
4: Gigabit NAS. (shared storage)
5: Wireless
If going the NAS route, make certain all components within the network are gigabit capable, remembering that wireless connection to the network will drop performance.
p.1 #3 · Need advice for a fast network drive with multiple users
Jimmy Ho wrote:
1. What additions to our home network should we incorporate in order to both work off of 1 drive together. Please keep in mind we're likely to purchase additional eqiupment for redudancy (2 drives, or RAID).
2. What type of drives would be fast enough for us to work on RAWs together? Are drives such as Lacie BigDisk Gigabit, Western Digital World Edition II fast enough for our purposes?
3. Will we need to upgrade to gigabit on everything and how much of a difference will we notice?
4. How can we store our own edits? Can Lightroom right .XMP onto a networked drive? Is there a better way for 2 photographers to work on the same set of files together at their own computer?
1) A NAS box would work great... and plenty are available with gigabit speeds and RAID. Most are easily configurable through a web interface.
They can get pricey and you may be better off using an old PC with a SATA RAID card and throw in some drives. Even starting from scratch with new parts... you would be close to what some of these NAS devices cost.
2) Most drives for 1 or 2 users will be fast enough. The SCSI interface is superior in this regard... but of course everything about SCSI is more expensive.
3) You will notice a difference in transfer speeds with gigabit NICs. You dont necessarily have to upgrade your router...you could buy a cheap 5 port gig switch and use that for communication between the workstations and NAS. At any point if your data chain that you have 100mb... that will be the bottleneck. And stay away from the wireless NAS solutions... even the fastest wireless is still 1/10th the speed of wired.
4) Not sure about lightroom, but if the preferences allow you the choice of where to store files, yes, you can point to a mapped drive on the NAS device. I would be cautious about working on same set of files... you will need to investigate how lightroom works in a multiuser environment.
p.1 #4 · Need advice for a fast network drive with multiple users
I have a Buffalo Terrastation. I've had it for a couple years now I suppose and it is rather slow by today's standards. It has worked fine with multiple users. It is faster than my network, it runs gigabit but my other hardware is 10/100. I've used it for streaming music without a glitch. The only thing I would recommend against is running a database image application with the images on the NAS. I tried this and it didn't work very well. Maybe with gigabit ethernet it would work OK.
