Portable Hard drive / SSD confusion

evening all.

I am not sure what is the best way for storage of my images?

Is the SSD best for use while editing and the Hard drive best for storage?

I use a 2015 Mac, any suggestions as to which way to go.

Thanks

I don't have a Mac, but I use an internal SSD for temporary storage and editing (and it contains the OS) and 2 external HD's for long term storage. One at home and one off site (bank safety deposit box).

SSDs are faster, which matters when picking a startup drive. HDDs are slower, but a portable USB 3 hard drive should be plenty fast enough for most things you are likely to do on a trip, especially if you're not doing heavy video editing.

SSDs may be more convenient for travel. They are theoretically more shock-resistant, and there are some SSDs that are physically much smaller than portable hard drives.

HDDs are usually larger, cheaper, and cheaper per gigabyte. They may be safer bets for long-term backups (although no type of drive is immune from failure).

Whatever type(s) of storage you choose, it may be useful to have two backups of every image, and to keep one backup separate from the others (so that it's unlikely that both will get stolen at the same time). The second backup could be on something as simple as a USB flash drive that lives on your key ring.

I tend to edit on the local hard drive (on my PC I have an SSD for the "program" drive and traditional HDs for storage). But the most important thing, to me, is having two copes, and for that I use cloud storage.

I use Dropbox, and if I have to copy files off the camera's card while on the road, I copy them to a Dropbox-attached folder -- that way I have near-instant backup (though on slow hotel connections that sometimes means leaving the computer on all night).

I try to avoid using portable drives as that's a single point of failure. If the drive fails, my pics are gone.

Back home, all of my photos (and scans) are kept on Dropbox-enabled folders, so I get an instant backup from the cloud. I have a second backup computer that just connects to dropbox. Every week or two I turn it on and let it run for a while. Now I have at least three copies: One on the desktop computer, one in the cloud, and one on the backup computer. I'm pretty well covered.

I've lost some photos to an HD failure (an external drive I knocked over when it was running) and need to do $300 data recover to get them back. I won't make that mistake again.

Aaron

bombhead said:

evening all.

I am not sure what is the best way for storage of my images?

Is the SSD best for use while editing and the Hard drive best for storage?

I use a 2015 Mac, any suggestions as to which way to go.

Thanks

Click to expand...

Ideally, you use an SSD in your Mac for programs and editing, an external SSD for storage, and an external HDD for backup. That way, accessing your images is fast whenever you want them, and the external HHD can be slow (and does not need to be portable) as you back up files while you are not using your computer.

SSDs are much faster to access than HDDs and they are way smaller, but they are also pricier. Something like a SanDisk Extreme Portable 1TB SSD, for example, is ideal for travel and not all that expensive, while small, lightweight and near-indestructible.

bombhead said:

evening all.

I am not sure what is the best way for storage of my images?

Is the SSD best for use while editing and the Hard drive best for storage?

I use a 2015 Mac, any suggestions as to which way to go.

Thanks

Click to expand...

As others have suggested I usually edit files stored on my iMac’s internal SSD, however I have also used external SSD just fine. I don’t usually batch process more than a few files (<10)

i also back the entire machine in two ways:

Time Machine to portable SSD. I use a pair of drives that I alternate weekly.

Cabon Copy Cloner to an external NAS (network attached storage) with HDDs configured as RAID 5. I back up seven machines to the NAS (2 Mac, 5 Linux) Each room in my home is wired for Ethernet so I am not limited by WiFi

I also back up photos only to a pair of portable SSDs that I swap weekly of after major amounts of changes. I don’t encrypt the photo backups. One of these goes to a friends home ( off site storage). I do the same thing with other key files such as personal and financial data which does get encrypted.

35 years of mission critical IT work behind me so I am a bit into redundancy. And multiple methods to recover data.

SSDs are much better for speed.

SSDs are much, much better for shock resistance and not just randomly failing, which should be your highest priority unless this is something always sitting at your desk and never getting dropped.

SSDs can struggle with data corruption over very, very long time periods without having access to power. 3 years is perfectly fine. Maybe over 10 years it could be an issue, not certain.

SSDs are better for low weight.

HDDs are cheaper, higher capacity (you can buy 16TB HDDs at a reasonable price) , more archival. Capacity is a non-issue for photos, but could be one for very high quality uncompressed video.

Andersonm said:

SSDs are much better for speed.

SSDs are much, much better for shock resistance and not just randomly failing, which should be your highest priority unless this is something always sitting at your desk and never getting dropped.

SSDs can struggle with data corruption over very, very long time periods without having access to power. 3 years is perfectly fine. Maybe over 10 years it could be an issue, not certain.

SSDs are better for low weight.

HDDs are cheaper, higher capacity (you can buy 16TB HDDs at a reasonable price) , more archival. Capacity is a non-issue for photos, but could be one for very high quality uncompressed video.

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HDDs tend to be better for long term storage where the drive will be powered down for months or years at a time.

Some early SSDs had issues with data fading after only a few weeks of being powered down.

SSD and hard drive both do the same job. It's just that an SSD is much faster and has no moving parts to wear fail when you drop it. It boils down to cost, not whether you're looking at editing vs. long term storage.

I use SSD in all my computers. When my NAS needs an upgrade, those will get SSDs too.

Some people mentioned long term storage, as in, 3 years powered down. That's risky no matter what the technology is. I would never just take an HDD and put it in a drawer. I can't envision a plausible situation that would involve putting an HDD full of data into a drawer and leaving it there.

Best practice is to back up your photos to a Cloud service. Let others worry about long term storage.

Bob said:

SSD and hard drive both do the same job. It's just that an SSD is much faster and has no moving parts to wear out. It boils down to cost, not whether you're looking at editing vs. long term storage.

I only use SSD in my computers. When my NAS needs an upgrade, those will get SSD to.

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Yes, SSDs have no moving parts, and are faster. But they are more susceptible to data fade, and it's much more difficult to recover anything when there is a problem.

No media is perfect. The best strategy is multiple copies on different types of media. I'm partial to some copies on traditional HD, and some copies on BD-R (Write once media is less susceptible to ransomware).

This has long been a settled matter among IT professionals and data recovery specialists that magnetic media is the safest media for long-term storage.

SSD is best for speed and more resistant to impact damage which portable devices suffer often.

If an SSD goes bad, data recovery can be more expensive than a magnetic disk and in more cases than magnetic, impossible.

If you're looking for portability, I would say SSD all the way unless you're looking at extremely large capacity drives, and in that case I'd be wondering why you need that much portable storage vs. using something like cloud storage.

A 1TB SSD runs about $80. A 1TB HDD platter drive runs about $50 (prices for bare drives). The HDD might be ~$30 cheaper but it's also a lot more fragile and if it's meant to be portable, there's a chance it can be knocked or dropped accidentally. That's not to say that the SSD is bulletproof but if an HDD falls off of a desk it might damage something inside. I don't have the same worry for an SSD.

Good luck and Happy Shooting!

Alex Ethridge said:

This has long been a settled matter among IT professionals and data recovery specialists that magnetic media is the safest media for long-term storage.

SSD is best for speed and more resistant to impact damage which portable devices suffer often.

If an SSD goes bad, data recovery can be more expensive than a magnetic disk and in more cases than magnetic, impossible.

Click to expand...

I agree with this.

My question, though, what is "long-term" storage? Even though HDD are more robust in that sense, I'm still not going to leave anything on an HDD without a backup. Thus, given the low-cost and ease of implementing a Cloud-based backup strategy, why should I worry about long-term reliability? I'd rather have my computer be lightning fast.

I guess if I had to keep an 2TB drive in a safe deposit box at some bank, I'd use an HDD. But would I be able to find a computer with a compatible interface 30 years from now? By then we might be using 100 TB holographic nano crystals

Bob said:

Alex Ethridge said:

This has long been a settled matter among IT professionals and data recovery specialists that magnetic media is the safest media for long-term storage.

SSD is best for speed and more resistant to impact damage which portable devices suffer often.

If an SSD goes bad, data recovery can be more expensive than a magnetic disk and in more cases than magnetic, impossible.

Click to expand...

I agree with this.

My question, though, what is "long-term" storage? Even though HDD are more robust in that sense, I'm still not going to leave anything on an HDD without a backup. Thus, given the low-cost and ease of implementing a Cloud-based backup strategy, why should I worry about long-term reliability? I'd rather have my computer be lightning fast.

Click to expand...

It's not an either-or situation. I have SSD as the OS drive for speed and mechanical hard disks for long-term storage. I'll use my own system as an example.

I have an NVME as my OS drive but I have never used the Microsoft-default settings for storing user data. Documents, Music, Pictures and Videos, folders on drive C are totally empty. My user data storage media is a mechanical hard disk (drive D). That's where my daily user data goes. Each morning at 4:00 AM, all user data is copied to a backup drive (E and then that operation is repeated but copied to another mechanical drive (X. So each day, I have complete backups to two distinctively separate magnetic hard disks. This happens in the background without any user help with batch files I have written that are run daily by the Windows task scheduler (Control Panel> Administrative Tools> Task Scheduler).

Bob said:

I guess if I had to keep an 2TB drive in a safe deposit box at some bank, I'd use an HDD. But would I be able to find a computer with a compatible interface 30 years from now? By then we might be using 100 TB holographic nano crystals

Click to expand...

At the end of each year, I purchase two new mechanical hard disks and copy all user data to those, each one being a duplicate of the other, one stored at my home and the other in my son's office about twenty-five miles from here.

One cannot be certain what media will be readable in thirty years but one can know more about that as time passes and technology changes and make the appropriate transfer of that data as needed to the newer technology.

Bob said:

Alex Ethridge said:

This has long been a settled matter among IT professionals and data recovery specialists that magnetic media is the safest media for long-term storage.

SSD is best for speed and more resistant to impact damage which portable devices suffer often.

If an SSD goes bad, data recovery can be more expensive than a magnetic disk and in more cases than magnetic, impossible.

Click to expand...

I agree with this.

My question, though, what is "long-term" storage? Even though HDD are more robust in that sense, I'm still not going to leave anything on an HDD without a backup. Thus, given the low-cost and ease of implementing a Cloud-based backup strategy, why should I worry about long-term reliability? I'd rather have my computer be lightning fast.

I guess if I had to keep an 2TB drive in a safe deposit box at some bank, I'd use an HDD. But would I be able to find a computer with a compatible interface 30 years from now? By then we might be using 100 TB holographic nano crystals

Click to expand...

I thinks there's a lot that would go into a decision like this. I do think for a lot of people, especially laypeople cloud storage is a viable and useful option. I can see some issues with it, though:

If I'm out travelling, I'm usually at the whims of whatever broadband/wifi I can find, and if you're in a hotel it's not always the fastest internet possible. Doing some roundabout figures here (YMMV of course), if you have 100 raw files plus sidecars and the processed .jpgs on a laptop, that could easily be around 3GB of files, and uploading that to a cloud service can be long and dicey. You're looking at hours. Contrast that to copying that to an external drive so the files exist in 2 locations. That takes a lot less time, and you can always upload them to the cloud later when you have better, more robust connections.

Per the OP's title, portability seems to be a key so IMHO SSD is the way to go, as per my last post. I do think it would be ill-advised for the OP to have their long-term backup storage of everything (everything photos or *everything*) in a portable drive. That's an accident waiting to happen. In that case having a smaller portable drive for redundancy while travelling, and then implementing cloud-based storage or a NAS backup might be a better solution for long-term storage. I do the latter and in that case once you reach larger capacity drives, right now HDD's are more economical than SSD's.

My $0.02.

LordKOTL said:

Bob said:

Alex Ethridge said:

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Click to expand...

If I'm out travelling, I'm usually at the whims of whatever broadband/wifi I can find, and if you're in a hotel it's not always the fastest internet possible. Doing some roundabout figures here (YMMV of course), if you have 100 raw files plus sidecars and the processed .jpgs on a laptop, that could easily be around 3GB of files, and uploading that to a cloud service can be long and dicey. You're looking at hours. Contrast that to copying that to an external drive so the files exist in 2 locations. That takes a lot less time, and you can always upload them to the cloud later when you have better, more robust connections.

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Raw files from a Canon 5DS can easily be 60MB or more, and the associated JPEG can be another 10. PhotoShop files can easily be 150MB or more. Add a few layers, and the Photoshop files easily top 400MB each. It's easy to generate 7GB of data with 100 images.

A lower resolution 5D4 produces 36MB raw files at ISO 100, and larger ones at higher ISO. Associated JPEGs run around 9MB. That's 4.5GB for 100 images.

My experience is that I am lucky to get 3 megabits/sec upload at a hotel. 3 megabits per second is 0.375 megabytes/sec, or 22.5 MB/minute, which is 1.3GB per hour.

If you do generate 10 GB of data in a day, plan on at least an 8 hour upload.

Of course, these are ballpark figures. Many cameras produce smaller raw files, some photographers shoot only JPEG, not everyone Photoshops their images.

While some photographers shoot less than 100 images in a day, some shoot more. There are times where I have had shoots that generated thousands of images, and over 300GB of data in a single day.

Michael Fryd said:

LordKOTL said:

Bob said:

Alex Ethridge said:

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Click to expand...

Click to expand...

If I'm out travelling, I'm usually at the whims of whatever broadband/wifi I can find, and if you're in a hotel it's not always the fastest internet possible. Doing some roundabout figures here (YMMV of course), if you have 100 raw files plus sidecars and the processed .jpgs on a laptop, that could easily be around 3GB of files, and uploading that to a cloud service can be long and dicey. You're looking at hours. Contrast that to copying that to an external drive so the files exist in 2 locations. That takes a lot less time, and you can always upload them to the cloud later when you have better, more robust connections.

...

Click to expand...

Raw files from a Canon 5DS can easily be 60MB or more, and the associated JPEG can be another 10. PhotoShop files can easily be 150MB or more. Add a few layers, and the Photoshop files easily top 400MB each. It's easy to generate 7GB of data with 100 images.

A lower resolution 5D4 produces 36MB raw files at ISO 100, and larger ones at higher ISO. Associated JPEGs run around 9MB. That's 4.5GB for 100 images.

My experience is that I am lucky to get 3 megabits/sec upload at a hotel. 3 megabits per second is 0.375 megabytes/sec, or 22.5 MB/minute, which is 1.3GB per hour.

If you do generate 10 GB of data in a day, plan on at least an 8 hour upload.

Of course, these are ballpark figures. Many cameras produce smaller raw files, some photographers shoot only JPEG, not everyone Photoshops their images.

While some photographers shoot less than 100 images in a day, some shoot more. There are times where I have had shoots that generated thousands of images, and over 300GB of data in a single day.

Click to expand...

Exactly. I was just doing some back of the napkin calcs based on my D750 raw files, which are ~33MB files. Your point about larger raw files is good, though.

Well digital cameras are also meant to be portable but if you drop them, there's a also a pretty good chance you will damage them. Same with a hdd.

There are advantages and drawbacks to each technology. You want capacity, you buy an hdd. You are clumsy and tend to drop things, get an ssd. Both are relatively easy to loose.

For long term storage, i don't think there's a anything that can beat the good old hdd. For quickly moving files around, ssds are fine.