Keep them 'doggie's movin' ...
Tuesday, January 19th 2010 @ 3:29 PM (not yet rated)
RAWHIDE! Ok, so at times I get old TV theme songs stuck in my head. Today, besides writing about organizational issues for photographers, I'm doing some re-organizational work myself. I'll explain a little bit in this blog.
For the last few years, my main computer was my workstation in our studio. It's got a desktop PC (that was pretty fast a couple years ago) with FOUR internal drives, eSATAII "black box", good video card with two color-calibrated CRT monitors, a WACOM pen-tab at my left hand, and a mouse at my right (ambi-dexterous lefty that I am). It was quite a set-up ... but ...
Last summer I got a new laptop, running Win-Vista in 64-bit mode, with the same 4 gigs of RAM as my desktop, multi-core processor, separate video processor and memory, with eSATA, Firewire 800, and multiple USB2.0 connector jacks. It just plain BLOWS my desktop out of the water when say, processing 20 of my D3's large RAW files to Adobe's DNG format or making up-rezzed JPEG's for printing wall prints. Seriously! As in, doing the same task in 1/10th the time. On a laptop, even!
No, the monitor situation isn't as nice, or as calibrated yet, though the viewing area is a full 16 inches wide and HIGHLY detailed ... (did I mention it's a HUGE laptop?) ... and no, I haven't broken apart my studio station and brought my beloved pen-tab home. Yet.
But this laptop is so fast I can't work on the studio computer for more than a couple images before I'm headed home in frustration! So, I've been setting up a home office in our guest bedroom with a beautiful view across our place. And those connections on my new laptop have been the key to fully using this cool tool. So, here's the shelf below my computer with four 1-terrabyte hard-drives all connected to my laptop using various connections:
From left to right, the Western Digital 1-Terrabyte MyBook I use for video processing (actually, the MAC edition with the WIN software down-loaded onto it) using a FireWire 800 connection; the 1-terrabyte Seagate SATAII internal-type drive that houses my "current" photo files in two partitions for Pro and Personal work, mounted in a Kingwin EZ-DOCK "black box" using an eSATA connection (for speed the same as an internally-mounted drive); and two Hitachi 1-terrabyte internal SATAII drives mounted in a Kingwin EZ-DOCK2 using a USB2.0 connection for backup and archiving.
Here's some useful information: what are the real comparative SUSTAINED transfer speeds of the three types of connections I have here? Well, SATAII is rated at 3 gigabits per second for a theoretical or "burst" limit, though realistically drives can only sustain between 60-80 megabits per second. In use, "external" SATA or eSATA connections are as fast as an internally-connected hard-drive wired to your computer's main "bus" or board. Firewire 800 will (depending on your computer) sustain somewhere between 40-45 megabits/second, and USB2.0 connections can now sustain around 30-35 megabits per second. (NOTE: MegaBITS are much smaller than megaBYTES!)
So ... that valuable eSATAII connection is reserved for the hard-drive I use the hardest on a daily basis. The slower USB2.0 connections go to the drives used for backup/archive use, where speed is NOT an issue. And the in-between Firewire800 goes to the drive with the video files; I don't use it as often, but it does need hi-speed when I do. That silver MyBook box also has an eSATAII connection, so sometimes, if I'm going to be spending a day rendering a larger video file, I'll swap it to the eSATAII connection instead of Firewire800.
The two 1-T Hitachi archive-drives are ALWAYS out of their "mount" when not in use (for data safety), and are stored elsewhere if I'm gone from home. (And I ain't a tellin' where over the net!)
Here's the reason for making changes today to my drive and folder names: up until last summer, that middle Seagate was the off-site back-up drive for my studio workstation. It's a reversed situation now, as I use this drive as my "current" files drive and the studio station's drives as one part of my archive/backup set-up. And I've added the MyBook and the backup/Archive black box and drives to the equation. So it's time for some re-configuration, officially recognizing what is used for what now. And of course, utilizing the knowledge I've gained researching best-practices for DAM (Digital Asset Management, the storage of our digital files.)
I need to re-name the top root-level folders on my Seagate drive from their present names of "Shared Backup" to "Shared Working". Then I'll need to go into both Lightroom and IDimager (the DAM program I'm starting to use) and change the "connections" in their folder-views to the newly "created" drives, and re-sync them. They just need to know where the images they have in their database really "are", so once they "see" the top-level folder of a structure they already "know", they are all hunky-dory.
As per suggestions in Peter Krogh's book, I'm re-naming the volume names for those two Hitachi drives (the name you see next to the letter, like "Archive001 (R:)". I had just named one "ArchiveA" and the other "ArchiveB". Peter STRONGLY suggests numerical names ... infinitely "scalable" (expandable) and simple to see. I think I'm going to re-name those volumes while they're relatively un-populated.
Then I need to re-do my backup software's "saved profiles" so the "new" locations of the images, databases, and drives replace the "old" names and or locations. I love the way backup software can remember jobs and just does it's thing when you click a task or profile!
The last part of the job will be to go to the studio and rename the root-level folders there to "Archive" and set Lightroom to use the external-SATA drive as it's main images drive for when I do work there.
It's not a huge job, it's just a task with several specific steps that I've thought out from several angles before choosing. Yea, it will take a while, but not too long. And it isn't necessary that this be "the perfect" solution, just a good, workable solution.
Is it the most fun way to spend a day? Not particularly ... but compared to say, crawling around in four inches of 3-month old chicken ... um, doo? ... in a dusty and stinky building to catch and carry chickens out to the truck taking them to market, it's a JOY! (And you don't even have to throw every bit of clothing and your shoes away afterwards!)
