Technology – Never Enough Storage Space.
Although the capacity of hard drives has increased, and the cost/(MB, GB, TB) has gone down, technology lets us collect more and more data. Each image I take with the 36 MP Nikon D800 and save in RAW format takes up ~40 MB of storage space. I’m the type of person that saves every image (other than the ones that are totally white or black, totally out of focus). I like to go back and review the images to learn from my mistakes, and also get ideas of things that I want to do better when returning to a site I have photographed before. As the image processing software has improved, I find that I can reprocess images to get something good/interesting out of a previously rejected/not-interesting image. (Just ask the photographer that had images of Monica with Bill).
Well, this year with all of my travel I hit the wall again with my data storage. I started off a few years ago with one (Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds) then a 2nd (Lenovo ThinkPad W510) computer at home that I use to process images, each with a collection of disks with images. I also keep a 3rd set of the original images offsite. I first used a collection of Western Digital MyBook 2-disk arrays – but ran out of USB, Firewire, and eSata ports on my computers. I then upgraded to a Drobo 800i (8 x 2 TB disk array) that was connected to my primary computer via gigabyte Ethernet. I finally had all of my images in one place. Life was good until I needed to expand the storage space. To upgrade to a (8 x 3 TB disk array), I had to replace the disks in the Drobo one at a time and then wait 2-3 days for until I could replace the next drive. The same thing happened when the Drobo indicated that a disk had failed – and unfortunately the log files on the Drobo are encrypted so you can’t tell what caused the problem. One of the “failed” disks that I replaced, I ran a full analysis using the Seagate SeaTools – and found no errors/problems with the disk (I ultimately repurposed the hard drive and have been using it for a year with no problems). I had also been reading other reports on the net about Drobo’s that became bricks, and issues with lack of support after the warranty ended. I decided to investigate other large capacity storage systems, and ultimately decided to try out a Synology DS1812+ system initially with the 8 x 2 TB drives that I just removed from the Drobo 800i.
The Synology disk arrays runs on Linux using a program they call DSM. Much more flexible than the Drobo, and a lot more real-time diagnostic information about the health of the system. The other neat thing about the Synology DS1812+ is that it has two eSata ports that you can add Synology DX513 (five disk arrays). As soon as the Seagate 4TB drives became available at a reasonable cost I added a Synology DX513 with 5 x 4TB Seagate hard drives. You plug it in, and all of a sudden you have another 14.3 TB (one disk fault tolerance) of storage space. This was working well through the beginning of this year – my primary image processing computer (Lenovo W700-ds) using the older Drobo 800i and the secondary image processing computer (Lenovo W510) using the Synology DS1812+ and DX513. I would keep the two disk arrays synchronized using sneaker-net and FolderMatch. (Future project – home server and networking).
After the Semester at Sea Spring 2013 Enrichment Voyage, and my recent trip to Iceland I was getting close to running out of space on my primary system. Then I got a warning light on the Drobo that another drive failed. I ordered a new Seagate 4TB drive and when it arrived (Amazon overnight is great) it took 6 days before I had all green lights on the Drobo again. The other problem that I had was that the Drobo array was not recognized after rebooting the computer. I thought I had a Drobo brick. If I was really patient, the computer would finally see the Drobo array after 30-60 minutes. I can see where others with this problem were not patient enough, gave up on Drobo – and published there rants on the internet. I was beyond the warranty and didn’t want to sit on the phone and pay for support. Enough was enough and I decided it was time to give up on the Drobo, and ordered the newer Synology DS1813+ which I populated with 8 x 4TB Seagate NAS drives and a DX513 with 4 x 4TB Seagate NAS drives. Each array is set up with one disk fault tolerance, and gives me a total of 25.3 + 14.3 = 39.6 TB of capacity for my primary image processing computer. This should get me through another year (or two or three) unless the Nikon D4x comes out at 54 MP 
The Drobo 800i will probably become part of my offsite data storage.