Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
The G-Technology Shuttle XL EV is a beast of a RAID array and has the storage and speed to deal with just about anything you can throw at it. Or so they say.
As anyone who has read any of my articles before, you would know that as a video producer, I need lots and lots of fast storage. And if you haven’t read any of my stuff before, well, just assume that as a video producer, I need lots and lots of fast storage. ;)
GoPro Plus subscription service offers additional benefits to its users. Starting from 30 January 2019, all subscribers will have unlimited cloud storage space for videos and photos, instead of the 35-hour limit they had so far.
The storage space race never seems to end. With ever-increasing storage demands on both consumers and storage facilities, it’s not surprising. We’re creating more digital content than ever before. Whether it’s text, photos or videos. Now, Nimbus Data have beaten out Seagate’s 60TB proof-of-concept SSD and completely annihilated Samsung’s recent 30TB SSD announcement.
Aimed more at data centres than home users, Nimbus Data has announced the ExaDrive, which holds a ridiculous 100TB of data. Unlike the 2.5″ Samsung, the ExaDrive comes in a 3.5″ SATA form factor to make it fit better with server and rack size standards. The company says that the ExaDrive DC100 is “optimized for capacity and efficiency”.
If you are a creative going both video and photos and amassing a huge amount of data you may have considered both a dedicated storage and maybe a cloud service.
Personally, I use a Synology 5 bay NAS as a second storage and Backblaze B2 as my cloud provider. The tip here is relevant for all providers of cloud storage though.
When I hooked up to B2, I already had about 2 Terabytes of data that I wanted to back up. Day to day operations should not be an issue, but getting that initial chunk of data up was something that needed consideration. I needed to get that data up there fast.
I think I’m going to stop listening to anybody who says that hard drives are dead and SSD is the only future of storage. Don’t get me wrong, I love SSDs. They’re fantastic for when you need really rapid access to data. They’re great as a system drive for your operating system and software.
When it comes to pure storage, though, they still can’t really hold a candle to hard drives for capacity. Well, not unless you want to spend an absolute fortune. Western Digital have just announced a new “breakthrough” technology in hard drive storage. Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording. They say that it will allow them to create hard drives 40TB and larger.
It’s insane to think that hard drive space has gone from around $500,000 to as low as $0.03 per gigabyte in the last 36 years. It has, though. But that drop in price is slowing down. It has to. Even as recently as 8 years ago, drives were hitting under $0.10 per GB.
Backblaze recently had a look into just how hard drive prices have changed over the years, and they turned up something quite fascinating. One would expect that the larger the drive, the lower the per gigabyte cost. But it turns out that’s not quite happening in the real world.
There’s a sale going on at BestBuy at the moment on WD easystore 8TB External USB 3.0 hard drives. A massive discount which drops the price from $299.99 to $159.99. “What’s the big deal, though?” I hear you ask. “They’re just external USB drives”. Well, yes, but those USB boxes contain Western Digital RED (NAS) SATA drives which normally also cost $299.
It’s easy to open up the cases and pull out the bare drives to use internally. And if getting 8TB storage drives at half price wasn’t enough, the drives contained within these enclosures have double the regular cache. 256MB vs 128MB. With four of these, in a USB3 RAID enclosure, you’ve got 24TB RAID 5 for under $800.
As the number of photos we take grows, the more space we need for storage. Apple has launched HEIF and HEVC, formats that could save you up to 50% of storage for photos and videos. They’ve launched it for the camera in iOS 11, and it’s supposed to replace JPEG and allow you to shoot twice as much photos without compromising the image quality.
As our data creation and acquisition requirements soar, so must the technology to store it all, and a team of computer scientists and electrical engineers from the University of Washington have seem to have made a bit of a breakthrough.
In a paper presented in April at the ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages an Operating Systems (ASPLOS), the team detailed one of the first complete systems to encode, store and retrieve digital data using DNA molecules, capable of storing information millions of times more compactly than existing storage technologies.
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