Free Storage? Creating high-performance online storage for under
$1/Gigabyte!
(Ed. Note: 2003 Article, prices are now even lower!)
As we all know digital photographs expand to fill all available disk space.
As a result a huge amount of effort is expended in creating and managing
"off-line" archives of CDs and more recently DVDs of images. As a catastrophe
backup, CDs, DVDs, or tapes are a great idea. As working storage media, they are
a real hassle. Not only do you need to burn your images to the media, but then
you need to catalog them (using a program such as
DigitalPro that supports offline
catalogs), and then if you need to access them you need to load the volume onto
your machine.
Until recently this has been the only cost effective way for many volume
shooters to work. Disk storage has been both too expensive and expanding
existing machines too much of a hassle to make it practical for most of us. Two
new events have changed this. The first is the advent of high-speed and easy to
use external inter-connects--Firewire (IEEE 1394) and USB2.0. Both are plenty
fast for use with normal disk drives (although neither will make Photoshop
mavens with high speed RAID arrays all that happy). The second is the plummeting
price of high capacity disk drives.
As of this writing, Fry's (aka outpost.com) will sell you a 200GB hard drive
for $120 after rebate. That is $.60/MB and half the price it was two months ago.
Of course that is for a bare "internal" IDE drive, so you'll need to get an
enclosure. My favorite, although not the cheapest, are the ADS Dual Link Drive
Kit enclosures for under $100. Total out the door is around $200 for 200GB of
external fairly high-speed disk storage. Personally I use a couple now, both for
images and then to have a high-performance location for backups. I still keep a
set of tape backups off site, but at over $20 per 20GB tape, it is actually
cheaper and easier for me to back up to a hard drive for my daily operating
backups!
Stay tuned for a future issue of DigitalPro Shooter with more ideas and
information on photo storage options, but for now if you need an inexpensive,
large-sized disk we wanted to make sure you knew you had some great options!
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