Digital BW, The Print

A company I consult with has a large disk farm that is devoted to digital signal processing applications.  All their disk are mirrored raids which are hot switchable.  Their statistics show that
with mechanical drives larger than 1 TB the live expectancy for a drive is about 18 to 24 months.  They have real time monitoring that detects when a disk starts to have issues and replaces it before it fails. 

After my iMac had a disk crash, I decided I'm not going to worry about this.  SSD disk are not economically viable.  However, they are not viable for the large storage requirements that a Nikon D800E requires or scans from a 4x5.  I recently got a Macbook Pro Retina display with 16 GB of memory and a 512 SSD.  It is very capable for my research and it is quite a capable computer for image processing.  I bought a Thunderbolt display and a thunderbolt raid and configured it as a 3 TB mirrored raid.  I have code running to monitor the raid and when if one of the drives has an issue, I can hot swap it.  The raid is used for all the photo storage.  The beauty of the thunderbolt buss is you can daisy chain multiple devices.  

The applications and the Aperture libraries I am currently working on are stored on the SSD and after finished moved to the raid if I want to keep them. 

When I am home, I close the laptop up sit it in a stand, plug in the TB display with the raid disk plugged into it and use a blue tooth track pad and keyboard.  When I travel, I eject the disk, pull the TB display from the port and take the laptop with me.  I am quite happy with this setup and it also minimizes losing something important. 

T

On May 13, 2013, at 4:55 PM, Paul <roark.paul@...> wrote:

> With my main/desktop crashed, a weak laptop, and not such a great backup routine, I wonder if laptops and commercial cloud back-up are at a place where they can work for the large digital files full frame cameras produce, as well as serious image editing and printing work.
> 
> I have a new hard disc that I'll probably just stuff into my existing Dell box, but the interruption of my work that this crash has caused has certainly gotten my attention.
> 
> I suppose there are 2 issues -- computer power and cloud backup -- that probably need to be dealt with individually. 
> 
> I must say, it's been a very long time since I've had a hard disk crash before retiring the computer for other reasons.
> 
> Paul
> www.PaulRoark.com 
> 
> 

--
"I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other people." - Mark Twain 



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