Picture thoughts
I've noticed that my hobbies intertwine. Right now I'm thinking about my computer hobby along with my photographer. I've decided to get a better setup for storing my pictures than on my mac book. Lately I've been playing around with OpenFiler NAS. Some people swear by FreeNas but I like Redhat over BSD :p. Currently I have about 100GB or so of pictures with known duplicates because I have not stored anything in any order. That 100GB spans about 10 years or so.
With this in mind I don't need that much space to hold my pictures for another 20 years. I doubt I'll have any files larger than my D40 can take even if/when I replace it with a newer camera. I don't shoot in raw and rarely need to edit my photos. The only unknown will be video. Those files are huge and unruly.
Picasa does a good job of sorting everything for me by Year/Month/Date folders. Which is great because it does it on import. Also the face tagging is spectacular. Being cross platform is killer too. What, oh yeah, my storage box. I think a 1.5TB RAID5 (4 500GB drives)or so will do just fine for my photo needs only. That is I won't store any tv, apps, or documents on said box. I *could* go with 4TB but the current price of a 500GB SATA drive is roughly $50 USD and since it's my money I'd rather not spend more than I need. The only thing I need to make sure is that the box has enough RAM to keep going. My test box has 512MB and it constantly freezes up so 2GB+ is a must.
I could go with another DNS321 but I really want the RAID5 redundancy as opposed to RAID1. Losing my pictures is something I can't have happen.
I might get back to making my own picture website again but Picasa seems to fit my needs with out me doing any work. If anything I'll make a second box to keep off site for backups.
With this in mind I don't need that much space to hold my pictures for another 20 years. I doubt I'll have any files larger than my D40 can take even if/when I replace it with a newer camera. I don't shoot in raw and rarely need to edit my photos. The only unknown will be video. Those files are huge and unruly.
Picasa does a good job of sorting everything for me by Year/Month/Date folders. Which is great because it does it on import. Also the face tagging is spectacular. Being cross platform is killer too. What, oh yeah, my storage box. I think a 1.5TB RAID5 (4 500GB drives)or so will do just fine for my photo needs only. That is I won't store any tv, apps, or documents on said box. I *could* go with 4TB but the current price of a 500GB SATA drive is roughly $50 USD and since it's my money I'd rather not spend more than I need. The only thing I need to make sure is that the box has enough RAM to keep going. My test box has 512MB and it constantly freezes up so 2GB+ is a must.
I could go with another DNS321 but I really want the RAID5 redundancy as opposed to RAID1. Losing my pictures is something I can't have happen.
I might get back to making my own picture website again but Picasa seems to fit my needs with out me doing any work. If anything I'll make a second box to keep off site for backups.