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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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All contents copyright Pro Shooters LLC. All rights reserved.
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