Reliable external hard drive?

Fairyrose

Fairyrose

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Hi, I've just spent several days (!) sorting and copying my Lightroom Catalog to a new external hard drive, only to find late yesterday that it has failed (it was brand new). Luckily, as I was copying (not moving), I only lost a few days' work, no data. I will need to send that hard drive back (and figure out how to delete what may still be on there), but before I buy a replacement and start the process again I wanted to ask for recommendations for *reliable* hard drives. I have read a few tech reviews online but nothing beats recommendations from fellow photographers who actually understand how important it is not to lose your images (and several days' work!).

Many thanks in advance!

PS: I need about 10TB.....
 
Thanks for your reply. I've used the portable Seagate ones for a while and they seem fine (2TB each). I then bought a WD Elements 12TB because i wanted one place to keep Lightroom that was not likely to become short of space quickly. That one failed after only a few days's use :-( Maybe I should just stick with Seagate and buy the larger version from them.

Also, should have mentioned, I use a Mac.
 
If you're planning on working from the drive I'd recommend a portable SSD...Samsung T5, Sandisk Extreme, something like that. They are much faster and far more reliable than a drive with moving parts.

That said, you can NEVER guarantee against failure so backup in at least 2 locations whichever drive you pick.

Edit: just seen you need 10TB so the SSD isn't going to work. I think you've already mentioned the good brands (Seagate, WD, Toshiba) so just make sure you back up because drives can and will fail.
 
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Drives with more platters fail more quickly than those with fewer, so a bigger drive is likely to die sooner. All the big makes are good, but avoid the small portable drives because they often have non-standard internal connectors meaning that if the case is damaged the the drive can't be popped out and rehoused.

I use WD and Toshiba.
 
As above, the bigger the capacity of the disk unit, the more susceptible to failure (because you're closer to the bleeding edge of tech) and the more you're likely to lose.

Whatever you choose as the right bundle - 4 X 4TB, 6 X 2TB... It should be duplicated using drives from a different manufacturer. (If (say) Seagate make a range of faulty drives, it's less likely that WD will do so at the same time, so you'll still have one intact copy of the data)
 
All that data on a single drive?

I think the saying about hard drives should be a guide - there are only two types of hard drive, those that have failed and those that will fail!

Though not seen much mentioned for a while there was/is multidrive unit called Drobo that got good reviews on regard to function and failure 'protection' of data.
 
Western Digital MYBOOK. They use unusually good drives in the 8TB models.

People buy them on sale just to modify them as internal drives.
 
I have had drives of all major brands failing, even when new.

Still my preference typically goes for WD or Seagate. Both brands offer drives for specific purpose and having undergone different quality control, so choose the one that fits your purpose and don’t go for the cheaper ones.

But as said above, all drive will fail one day or another ...

One way of *limiting* the risk when one disk fails is using HD boxes which offer to include multiple drives and then using a RAID configuration. The most basic is a two disk bay configured in RAID 1, i.e. having the data mirrored on two drives

But don’t take RAID configurations as being the same as doing a backup.
 
You can build a DIY NAS if you have a spare old PC by installing something like OpenMediaVault, a Linux based NAS server package. this will allow you to configure RAID1 (Mirror) .

I use OMV on an old HP Microserver N40L with 4gb memory and 4 drive bays, populated with Toshiba and Seagate HDD.
 
Thank you all for your replies! It's good advice not to go too high in size.... whilst I need a large drive for backups of images I've just checked that my Lightroom Catalog itself is currently only about 2TB. So I could buy one drive for Lightroom and one or two larger ones for backups of images outside of Lightroom (where I need much more storage capacity. Does it sound right to you that the Lightroom storage is so relatively low compared to the overall storage of images? Should it not be about the same? Or does Lightroom use lower storage because of the way it processes images, avoids duplication etc?
 
GreenNinja67 said:
I swear by G-Tech for externals.
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I started using G Tech a few years ago too. So far so good.


Fairyrose said:
Thank you all for your replies! It's good advice not to go too high in size.... whilst I need a large drive for backups of images I've just checked that my Lightroom Catalog itself is currently only about 2TB. So I could buy one drive for Lightroom and one or two larger ones for backups of images outside of Lightroom (where I need much more storage capacity. Does it sound right to you that the Lightroom storage is so relatively low compared to the overall storage of images? Should it not be about the same? Or does Lightroom use lower storage because of the way it processes images, avoids duplication etc?
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I don’t get why you need a small disk for lightroom and a huge back up disk.

Do you any software to undertake the backup process for you?

I wrote about my backup system a while back. It’s basically one fast 2TB working drive, a 3TB RAID on-site drive and two portable external drives that make up the off site drives (currently 2TB and 4TB- one of which is always away from home). All backups are automatically done by Carbon Copy Cloner (mac software but windows equivalents are available).

https://spark.adobe.com/page/Os6kX8G8QcZoA/
 
Hi Rob, thank you for your reply. I've just read your article about your back up system as well. Makes sense what you do. I'm not that well advanced but I'm trying to get myself in a good position as far as back ups are concerned. This is what happened (sorry, long post!).......

I started off a while ago collating all photos stored in various places and saved them on two external hard drives, sorted by Year/Month/Event etc. I then started using Lightroom about a year ago (self-taught, so hopefully haven't done things completely wrong!). I have my Lightroom Catalog on another external hard drive (2TB). This ran out of space and so I bought the the new larger one, copied my Catalog on to that over Christmas/New Year and it failed.

For some reason my Lightroom catalog is smaller in size than my back up files, I think possibly because I have a large amount of duplication on my storage hard drives, and also some Apple Photos which I haven't figured out how to import into Lightroom yet, so my Lightroom catalog is bound to grow once I import those and also generally.

I don't use a software like Time Machine or the Carbon Copy Cloner you mention, but I'm pretty religious about downloading my SD cards after every photo trip, and certainly after every holiday!

What I don't understand about your back up system (but maybe I misunderstood something) is that you don't seem to save your actual images anywhere, just Lightroom copies. Is that right? I thought one of the things about Lightroom is that it doesn't hold your images such, only Lightroom copies....? So why don't you need to download your actual files? As I say, probably a silly question, please don't shoot me!
 
Fairyrose said:
What I don't understand about your back up system (but maybe I misunderstood something) is that you don't seem to save your actual images anywhere, just Lightroom copies. Is that right? I thought one of the things about Lightroom is that it doesn't hold your images such, only Lightroom copies....? So why don't you need to download your actual files? As I say, probably a silly question, please don't shoot me!
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I’m lucky that I’ve been using Lightroom since 2012 and never changed the DD/MM/YYYY file structure.

The RAW files are saved on the working drive which is a 2TB drive. It’s partitioned as Lightroom RAWS and Lightroom Catalogue. Lightroom never alters the RAW. I don’t save any images as a JPEG as I’ve always felt if I need a copy I would export it for the purpose it would be used for because depending on it intended use I export at different setting/sizes etc. The idea being as long I have the Lightroom catalogue file and the RAW file I can create a copy when required. I should mention I export small images to drop box where I can pick them up for posting to instagram, Flickr etc.

I have recently started to think that I should probably export all finished images as full size JPEGS and keep a copy somewhere (and a back up or two) because I know how to export the images but no one else does. Keeping a full sized JPEG would be much easier for other to find if they ever needed to.
 
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Fairyrose said:
What I don't understand about your back up system (but maybe I misunderstood something) is that you don't seem to save your actual images anywhere, just Lightroom copies
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You may know this already, in which case I apologise: Lightroom does not 'make' or adjust any images until you export, and all the changes you see are virtual adjustments applied to your original RAW files as they are displayed to you in Lightroom. Your lightroom catalogue contains no images (we'll ignore previews) and only data telling lightroom how to present your images to you according to the edits you have made. This is why the catalogue is much smaller than the original images.

If you lose your RAW files then ligtroom has no images to work on, but if you only lose your catalogue then you still have the original unadjusted images to work with.
 
Ancient Mariner - please don't apologise! In many ways Lightroom is a bit of mystery to me but the bit about it not saving actual images was something that seemed so crucial that I did clock that early on.... but I didn't know the detail, you explained it well. :-) I also didn't know that this makes such a big difference in storage size.
 
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