I’ll be honest with you, this video is going to be a little bit boring - sorry.
But before you click back - please subscribe!
Only joking - do stay and listen because even though it’s not very exciting this is something
which every single photographer and videographer needs to be thinking about, and it could save
your bacon, your reputation and your wallet!
You’ll be glad you watched!
So I want to give you some advice on storage.
Now, as creatives some of our most valuable (and irreplaceable) assets are the digital
files that we create, be that photos, videos or audio files.
It’s sooo important that you have a system of storage for these priceless assets which
gives you enough space to have them well organised so that you can find things easily, and to
make deletion due to human error less likely, as well as something that backs everything
up automatically so that you don’t have to remember to do it yourself (because let’s
be honest, you’ll forget and sod’s law that’ll be when something bad happens).
Good organisation has to be quick and it has to be easy, otherwise it’ll just not happen.
You may often hear the term “redundancy” when talking about data backup, and no - that’s
not a punishment for those who forget to back stuff up - although maybe it should be!
A hard drive is considered to be “redundant” when it has AT LEAST one “mirror”, or
another drive that sits silently alongside it, copying absolutely everything that the
main one has on it.
If either hard drive dies (sorry - I should say WHEN), all is not lost because you still
have the other drive and your data intact.
I used to achieve that with a NAS - that’s a Network Attached Storage device which is
basically like a large hard drive which plugs into a home or office network so is accessible
from any device on the network (like desktops, laptops, TVs, media streaming devices etc.)
but unlike a normal external hard drive it has two separate hard drives in - you’ve
guessed it, for redundancy so the second disk is constantly sitting there as an exact replica
of the first.
One of the drives in mine did start to fail a couple of years ago and needed replacing,
so without the redundancy I would have been in danger of losing everything!
With a capacity of 2 terabytes - two thousand gigabytes - that sounds like a lot but over
the 5 or so years I’ve had it it gradually filled up to the point that I didn’t have
enough space to store everything and ended up overflowing to other drives which was certainly
less than ideal, both from a data safety point of view and that of good organisation.
I was initially going to buy a second NAS to dedicate to Video footage but then whilst
I was editing this year’s Showreel for my video production company, which naturally
involves importing lots of archive footage, I was frustrated by the (unsurprisingly) poor
performance of video previews even when being fed via a “gigabit” connection, so I decided
to scrap the idea of a new, bigger NAS and instead go for beefing up the internal storage
inside my video editing PC so that everything could be kept local - after all, a SATA3 connection
beats a network drive hands down every time!
You can also get much more bang for your buck when going down this approach, as the data
I’m storing doesn’t desperately need to be accessible from anywhere else on my network,
even with the main Video Editing PC switched off, which is the main benefit that the NAS
provides.
The other function, data redundancy across two drives, can be achieved easily within
Windows without having to bear the cost of the NAS hardware to do that for you within
your budget.
Before we get into the hard drives and how to install them, time for a very quick shout-out
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So after looking around online the hard drives I went for were a pair of these High Performance
6TB Toshiba hard drives, with a spin speed of 7200rpm and a 128MB buffer.
You can find more information as well as purchasing links to support this channel, in the video
description below, so take a look.
Although it’s not absolutely required, two identical drives mean they’ll work perfectly
in a mirror together so to get that set up all you do is install them in the normal way
as you would any other hard drive - making sure that if your motherboard has different
speed SATA ports that you plug them into the fastest available.
As we’ll be creating the mirrored volume within Windows, you don’t need to mess with
any settings in your BIOS.
Once they’re plugged in, switch your computer back on and click start, then type in Disk
Management.
Since these are brand new hard drives, they’ll need to be initialised before you proceed
any further so make sure GPT is selected and then press OK.
Here, you can see my primary and secondary SSDs, as well as my old “Local Storage”
volume which is made up of two 500GB drives giving me a total of 1TB for local, non-redundant
working storage in a striped drive for performance.
I’m replacing that with the mirrored 6TB drives which are Disks 2 and 4 in this list
- the ones which are 6TB in size and colour coded black as they just contain unallocated
space at the moment.
Creating a mirrored volume is really easy, you just right-click the first drive and select
NEW MIRRORED VOLUME, and on the next dialog that pops up you you can add the second drive
to the mirror.
If you’re really paranoid you can of course buy more than 1 extra drive and add additional
redundant drives to the array, but I’m just going for one here.
Click Next and choose a different drive letter if you have a preference, then Next again
to select your formatting options and give the drive a label.
If they’re brand new drives, you can click “Perform a quick format” before pressing
Next and then Finish.
In fact I’d recommend clicking quick format, otherwise be prepared to wait several hours!
Windows will alert you that you’ll be converting the discs from basic to dynamic, which is
fine and exactly what we want to do, so click Yes on that dialogue box and then Windows
will create the Mirror and format your drives.
Once that’s done you can start copying your files onto the new Mirrored array, which will
of course just show up inside Windows as a single hard drive, with the copying and backing
up going on seamlessly behind the scenes without you even lifting a finger.
So, that’s my new setup done and dusted, with plenty of redundant, local storage for
all my media files and lots more free space on my NAS too which is definitely a bonus!
Remember this is just my on-site setup, and this doesn’t cover off-site backup which
is also important.
What does your setup look like?
Let me know in the comments section and feel free to share hints and tips with each other
so we can all help each other out.
Please give this video a thumbs up if you’ve found it interesting, useful or both, and
take a look at some of the other videos on the channel which you should definitely find
interesting if you’re into building computer systems, video and photography - or both!
For example you can look at my review and comparison of the NVIDIA GTX1080 graphics
card versus CPU only for video rendering in Adobe Premiere Pro and Affect Effects by clicking
up there, or another video from the channel picked just for you by clicking down there.
We cover a range of topics encompassing technology, gadgets, the internet, photography and videography
on this channel, so if you haven’t already subscribed please do click the Switched On
Network icon just down there for that, too.
Thanks for watching and I’ll hopefully see you again soon!