With a lot of people now owning digital SLRs and shooting in either RAW or RAW+JPEG, inevitably you are going to run out of space on your current computer hard drive (HDD) and require more storage space. You may also just be looking for various backup options for your digital photos – because if you have them all on your computer hard drive and for whatever reason it dies, you can lose years of digital photos and memories in an instant!
I was in that first situation recently with my 60GB computer hard drive down to its last 1GB – so I either had to purchase more storage or start deleting some of my photos. I decided to purchase an external storage solution – something that could be used from multiple computers, either PC or Mac, and something that offered redundancy.
I ultimately decided upon a Western Digital MyBook World Edition II (shown left) network-attached-storage (NAS) device. Basically you plug it in to your wired or wireless internet router/access point, follow a wizard and then you have either 1 or 2TB (terabytes) of additional storage accessible via PC or Mac. The great thing I liked about this particular device was the 3yr warranty and also that the storage by default is mirrored in a RAID 1 configuration. What does this mean? Basically inside the unit itself are 2 separate hard drives and each time you copy a picture or song or a word document across it is created once on each hard drive – so you’re immediately getting a backup copy created for you. If one of the hard drives in the MyBook crashes, you put in a new hard drive and all your existing data is copied back over to the new hard drive – and this all happens without any user input – not bad eh?
Because traditional hard drives contain a few moving parts, they will inevitably wear out – so having two hard drives means that the likelihood of you losing all your data (both drives crashing simultaneously) is very slim.
The downside to using a RAID 1 configuration is that overall capacity is essentially cut in half – so for instance I purchased the 2TB MyBook (containing 2x 1TB hard drives) however my maximum capacity for the ‘mirrored drive’ is 1TB – because all data is duplicated to the second disk. If it wasn’t mirrored my maximum capacity would be 2TB available but then I wouldn’t have any redundancy and could lose all my memories if one of the hard drives died.
The MyBook is not the cheapest storage option on the market (at around AU$420) – but if you care about your digital photos and don’t want to risk losing them it is certainly a good option if used in the RAID 1 (default) configuration.
