Hard Drive Specs working with large files

I'm going to be doing retouching work. I anticipate working on large, 16bit Photoshop files with many layers, full frame to medium format. I'm in the process of upgrading my PC tower and had these questions about the hard drive. I can get a 2TB, 7200RPM hard drive or a 4TB 5400 hard drive. I like the idea of having 4TB on my tower for working files and storage because it simplifies the need for backup external drives. The 2TB option will work for current files but much of the completed work will go to the externals for storage and backup. My question is, is the 7200RPM spec really that much faster churning through PS files or is the 5400RPM enough? I will have 32GB RAM. Thanks

You are concerned about storage; go bigger drive. If using fit for a scratch disk go faster.

Back in 2016 when was last time I build computer, I went with sata SSD for operating system and files under work and 5400rpm spining drive for archive. My logic for 5400rpm drive was lower power consumption, lower heat buildup and longer operating life than 7200rpm drives. You will want those external drives either way as hard drives are not everlasting.

I get that particularly for backup, the 5400 drives are better. And your point of about the slower drive will last longer is an important consideration I was not aware of. But as digitaldog points out, is the 7200 that much and noticeably faster to churn through files than the 5400 considering I am loading up on RAM?

If you are doing lots of image work, especially with deeper image depth, then 2T will not be enough for very long.

 

I use a couple of old 1TB "WD My Passport" drives as backup when I'm traveling and they work well enough there.

 

I think the Apple ][+ 5.25" floppy was between 111KB and 140±KB, for over $400 (1980s USD). Imagine!

Edited September 28, 2019 by JDMvW

Yes, I know 2TB won't last long. If I go for the 2TB, I'll end up using it more for current work and completed work will go to WD Externals for safe keeping. My question now is, how much faster is the a 7200RPM drive than a 5400RPM drive. If I went from one to the other would I say, "Wow, what a difference 7200 makes" or would I just see a marginal increase in file manipulation speed?

I do not know which manufacturer you are considering, but I went to the Western Digital site and compared specifications for their 4 TB Blue (5400 RPM) Drives and their 4 TB Black (7200 RPM) drives. The number of Load/Unload cycles was the same as was the unrecoverable read error rate. The only difference was that the Black drives have a 5 year warranty while the Blue drives have a only a 2 year warranty. That would suggest the Black (7200 RPM) drive is more reliable i.e. will last longer.

Go with one 16TB HD. If your workflow is organized correctly, you won't be going back and forth from the HD that much. Back-up with BackBlaze, for $50 per year. I've got 5TB filled right now and BB keeps it up to date daily. I've got a little 2TB SSD for transferring between laptop and desktops and backup on the road, when I travel.

The hard drive in question will be on a Dell PC.

The hard drive in question will be on a Dell PC.

 

Why limit yourself to Dell for you primary storage. Have a SSD in the Dell and a 16TB external drive and backup continuously with BackBlaze, for around $50 annually.

I’m going to check into this dc. I have read that external drives are slower to process with. Is this not your experience?

I’m going to check into this dc. I have read that external drives are slower to process with. Is this not your experience?

 

I start on the SSD with only 16GB of memory (4.0hz quad processor) in my tower and then Export to the external drive when I finish the file. Hard drive transfer speeds are just not an issue.

 

My Sony a7RIII produces around an 80MB RAW file, but I'm mainly a wildlife guy, so I don't use layers. I do everything in DxO, then Export from there to LR (to add logo) and then Export from there to my 16TB external drive. That drive and the drives in the tower are backed up to the BackBlaze cloud daily. I only use BB for backup and I've never had to recover. I read reviews where they express you a large HD to restore from, for guys like us, with TBs of images. I don't allow DxO or LR to manage my files, so I don't have extra crap floating around that I don't need.

I do not have experience with latest 7200rpm drives, but userbenchmarks suggests that 7200 is 5 to15 percent faster than 5400.

Thanks for all the input. Hapien, thanks for that benchmark info. In the real world, I don't think 5-15% is THAT big a difference. Not big enough to fret about. And thank again dc, I'm looking into BB and other online options. All my Office docs and spreads are backed up with 365 so photos are my main backup concern. from what I've read, BB backs up everything without a way to specify specific folders. Doing more research.

Thanks again.

External drives with an eSATA interface are equivalent to drives mounted inside the computer tower. They are just as fast (or faster), wake up at the same time, and you can boot from them. The Mac equivalent, in terms of functionality, would be Thunderbolt.

 

Any operations which swap data to and from a hard drive, even an SSD, will slow things down considerably. You need enough RAM to execute these operations without churning the disk, the more the better. You should have free memory at least 3x the size of your largest image file. 16 GB is probably adequate, but I prefer 32 GB for added margin. Photoshop is not the only application running on my desktop. There are tools in your PC system management folder which will show you how memory is being used, and how much is free for applications. In a Mac it is a tool called "System Activity." It's a good idea to have a third party utility which will measure drive speed for troubleshooting and usability analysis.

 

Drive speed is a function of the interface, cache memory and rotation speed. As a matter of long practice, I use 7200 RPM drives, and find their life cycle is satisfactory. 5400 RPM drives are common in laptops, which are power challenged. 10K drives are not that helpful, and have a significantly shorter life. For multi-stream video, I use an SSD with a data speed of about 600 MB/s, compared to a fast hard drive at 130-180 MB/s. I also have a fast video card with 4 GB of memory. Even that's barely enough for some 4K streams. For still images, a slow system makes you wait longer. For video, it means you can't view it in real time unless you resort to proxy files.

 

No single drive provides safe, archival storage. For that you need a RAID or Drobo enclosure, which will tolerate the failure of one (or more) drives without loss of data. A drive sitting in a box on a shelf is not really "archival" either. A running drive automatically refreshes its data, which deteriorates when idle due to magnetic interaction between tracks, say 10-12 years. If you want images for posterity, print them and store them in archival portfolios.

 

The MTBF for a hard drive is about 20,000 hours, or about 5 years of normal operation. Some fail sooner, some later, but all fail eventually.

Would this be a 2nd drive or would it be replacing what you have now? If it's replacing what you have now is that a 7200 rpm drive or a 5400? I think 5400 is fine as secondary storage. Assuming you don't have an SSD now, that's what I would put in and if you have room for another drive in your tower, then use your current drive or get a cheap 5400 rpm drive for extra space.

 

The different between a traditional spinning disk hard drive and an SSD is night and day.

 

From the horses mouth (Adobe):

 

• For best performance, connect the scratch disks to a compatible port that has the highest bandwidth limit of all the available ports. The bandwidth limits for various ports are as follows:
  Thunderbolt = 10GB/sec
  eSATA = 600MB/sec
  PCIe = 500MB/sec
  USB3 = 400MB/sec

• To improve performance, set the scratch disk to a defragmented hard disk that has plenty of unused space and fast read/write speeds. If you have more than one hard drive, you can specify additional scratch disks. Photoshop supports up to 64 exabytes of scratch disk space on up to four volumes. (An exabyte equals 1 billion GB.)

• If your startup disk is a hard disk, as opposed to a solid-state disk (SSD), try using a different hard disk for your primary scratch disk. An SSD, on the other hand, performs well as both the primary startup and scratch disk. In fact, using an SSD is probably better than using a separate hard disk as your primary scratch disk.

• Scratch disks should be on a different drive than any large files you are editing.

• Scratch disks should be on a different drive than the one your operating system uses for virtual memory.

• RAID disks/disk arrays are good choices for dedicated scratch disk volumes.

• Defragment drives with scratch disks regularly.

 

They are talking about scratch disks which you may or may not have set up but it's a good general performance breakdown. They don't mention 5400 vs 7200 at all and there is more to performance than rotational speed but what I will say is that I wouldn't buy a new 5400 rpm drive to use as the primary drive on my system if I had a choice.

 

I'm also a Back Blaze user and it's a good value for the money. You can't select individual folders to back up but you can exclude folders or drives. You can partition your drives if that's a real concern. The only thing I find bothersome as a Mac user is that Back Blaze won't backup TimeMachine volumes. Their reasoning is that it would be backing up stuff that's already backed up but what I want Back Blaze for is cloud backup, not local backup.

The 5400/7200 drive question will be the drive choice I make for the tower that I will upgrade to. It will be the working drive and have 1-2tb of storage and 32gb of RAM. Backup external drive choices, if I were to go that route, would be WD, as I have had great luck with them for years.

The 5400/7200 drive question will be the drive choice I make for the tower that I will upgrade to. It will be the working drive and have 1-2tb of storage and 32gb of RAM. Backup external drive choices, if I were to go that route, would be WD, as I have had great luck with them for years.

 

Honestly, I'd spring for an SSD of 512 Gig or better (256 Gig min) and then if you need the space buy another bare drive of whatever speed on Amazon for less than you'd pay Dell and put it in the tower. I'm guessing there's room for 3 or more drives in there. If you're going to the expense of upgrading your computer and building in a lot of RAM, don't hobble it with a slow drive.

 

My guess is that you will more readily notice the difference between an SSD and a traditional hard drive than you will notice the difference between 16 and 32 Gigs of RAM unless you already know that 16 isn't enough for what you want to do.

Edited September 30, 2019 by tomspielman

Thanks Tom, I know from what other photogs and Photoshop people are suggesting is that 32B of RAM for Photoshop working on large files with lots of layers is the desired spec. I've put RAM chips in computers before but adding actual drives will put me beyond my comfort zone. I'd want a new tower that is pretty much ready to plug in and go without much fuss.

adding actual drives will put me beyond my comfort zone

I am more comfortable adding drives - 4 screws, 2 plugs in a worst case - than RAM; always fiddly, maybe more sensitive. I never had real drives adding problems, besides back, when an elderly office box had a too weak PSU to handle a 3rd HDD and SCSI card plus the already additional 2nd graphics card.

I'd try going for SSDs; at least to hold OS software and scratch space plus, if possible, "files to work on". Shovel them on a HDD when you are done, but keep them quickly accessible for culling etc. would be my approach. SSDs seem so cheap compared to RAM that a small one to work from should be affordable. I can't imagine space or similiar problems inside a tower.

... Backup external drive choices, if I were to go that route, would be WD, as I have had great luck with them for years.

 

Onsite backup drives are not backups. They are merely redundant and don't protect you from fire or flood. I have two personal friends that lost there life's work in fire, because they had "backup" on site. BackBlaze is too inexpensive and easy to use to not include it in your plan.

Thanks Tom, I know from what other photogs and Photoshop people are suggesting is that 32B of RAM for Photoshop working on large files with lots of layers is the desired spec. I've put RAM chips in computers before but adding actual drives will put me beyond my comfort zone. I'd want a new tower that is pretty much ready to plug in and go without much fuss.

 

Got it. To answer you're original question, there will likely be a noticeable difference in boot times and application launch times between 7200 rpm and 5400 rpm drives. If you have software that catalogs your images, that will perform slower as well.

 

Given the amount of RAM you're having installed you won't likely notice a difference while doing the actual retouching work. Opening the image will take a little longer.

 

If you're using a 5400 rpm drive now and are happy with it, then I don't see a particular problem. But if you were to spend one week using the exact system with a 7200 rpm drive and the next week going to a system with a 5400 rpm drive, it would seem pokey to you. That said, there are inconveniences you have to take into consideration if your workflow involves multiple drives. Having one large drive is certainly more convenient.

 

Other people have already talked about the importance of backups. A catastrophic event like a fire or flood might be unlikely depending on where you live but they happen. I've also never had a personal hard drive fail. However, at my work place we probably have close to 3 hundred drives installed in workstations and storage devices. We lose 3 or 4 per year and sometimes more. So roughly a 1% failure rate per year. I don't know how typical that is. That may not seem bad, but it happens enough that I backup my personal stuff both to another device in my home and to the cloud.

Edited September 30, 2019 by tomspielman

Got it. To answer you're original question, there will likely be a noticeable difference in boot times and application launch times between 7200 rpm and 5400 rpm drives. If you have software that catalogs your images, that will perform slower as well.

 

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Install your apps on an SSD in the tower. That will substantially speed boot times.

 

Here are some interesting HD Durability Stats, courtesy of BackBlaze:

Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q1 2019

I think most of this has already been covered by the comments so far. FWIW, I think your question breaks down into 4 sub-topics:

- processing speed (retouching; get as much SSD (256 KB minimum) as you need to run your OS, retouching sw and other apps

- access speed: photos (work in progress) stored on SSD are somewhat faster accessible than on a HD; in practice (loading, saving) you won't notice the difference

- HD: I have no idea. I suspect that for most photos, it won't make much difference.

- backup/archiving: a larger HD is no substitute for backups/archiving. The more photos you have on HD, the more time it takes to backup and archive it. Up to you but I personally, I would go with a larger SDD, a smaller HD and more frequent backups/archives. Either to an online backup service or to an external drive. External SSD drives are faster than convententional external HDs.

 

Basically, everyone agrees that SSDs will gradually replace conventional HD's. If you you now buy a conventional HD, do this in the knowledge that this technology will replaced by SSD. Another thing (already mentioned) is that backups/archives are much safer online these days. My personal advice is to do both": keep a personal backup/archive and do it online too.

Install your apps on an SSD in the tower. That will substantially speed boot times.

 

Here are some interesting HD Durability Stats, courtesy of BackBlaze:

Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q1 2019

 

Those are interesting stats and not much different than what we experience at work. I'm sure publishing them only helps their business. ;)

 

If it were me and I had the same monetary constraints, I'd probably configure the machine from Dell with a fast processor and GPU and then purchase my own memory and drive(s). The primary drive would definitely be an SSD. Even if buying the SSD meant sacrificing total storage I'd do it, knowing that I could add more later. But I'm a little spoiled and I've been using an SSD at work for years.

 

As far as what the OP should do, they've already indicated that they aren't comfortable installing a drive on their own so they're left with the options that Dell provides or having somebody install the drive for them which would add to the cost. If it turns out that he's not happy with the performance he could take the computer to BestBuy or some local computer store and have them install an SSD down the road.