keithdunlop Posted October 8, 2008 Share Posted October 8, 2008 I am busy wedding photographer adding a second studio location and I have reached the point where I need to modify my image storage scheme for network access. I currently have a string of external firewire drives daisy-chained together at one location, and when I need more space I either add another drive to the chain or swap out the one with the lowest capacity. If I need to work on files when traveling it means unplugging one of the drives and hauling it with me; not very practical. The tangle of wires and power adapters has got to go, so I'm looking at NAS. These are my requirements: 1. A single NAS device for two hot-swappable SATA drives (RAID 1); 1 TB each for now. 2. Able to access my files from two computers; a desktop and a wireless laptop. 3. Able to access my files from a remote location and edit in Lightroom on a wireless laptop through the internet. 4. Firewire or USB port for plugging in backup devices. Regarding DROBO: I had seriously considered this, but I'm not crazy about having my drives configured to an unknown proprietary format. I prefer that the drives be readable in any SATA device rather than be solely dependent on the DROBO. I'm looking at the Netgear ReadyNAS DUO which appears to have good reviews. Any advice is greatly appreciated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bgelfand Posted October 8, 2008 Share Posted October 8, 2008 You may wish to do some reading here: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/85/93/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
john_oconnell14 Posted October 8, 2008 Share Posted October 8, 2008 Synology, Thecus and QNAP are very highly rated and regarded and all do a wide range of quality high performance NAS gear. You're spot on about Drobo gear. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jason_burke Posted October 9, 2008 Share Posted October 9, 2008 Hi Keith, Regarding device portability: If you use RAID you will most likely never be able to access data from a single drive without the RAID system itself. RAID will split up you data between the various disks as configured. If you use RAID 1 you may be able to get at your data but I doubt it. You will have to come up with a different solution for portability. I would get the best NAS solution that I could and use a small external drive for portability, perhaps a 2 1/2 inch laptop drive in an enclosure. How much storage do you need at each office? Are you going to back up your data between them? How much storage do you need for portability? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
keithdunlop Posted October 9, 2008 Author Share Posted October 9, 2008 Jason, The problem with using an external drive for portability is that it requires that I perform repetitive catalog exports in Lightroom to preserve the edits on the files I want to work on remotely. I thought that if I had the NAS plugged into a router that I could assign a dedicated IP and log into it remotely through the internet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jason_burke Posted October 10, 2008 Share Posted October 10, 2008 Keith, On the surface it sounds like a good plan, but there will be an issue with the speed of the connection. I am not sure off hand, does the catalog contain the images or just the meta-data that describes the edits? If it is just the meta-data, and the amount of data is small, it may work fine, but I have my doubts. The speed of the internet connection is quite slow when you compare it to a hard drive. I would use a VPN for this type of connection. Look into Hamachi. Its free, and a great place to start a test. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
d._b.2 Posted October 15, 2008 Share Posted October 15, 2008 the new album is amazing Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pierre_c1 Posted October 22, 2008 Share Posted October 22, 2008 LR's catalog contains only the metadata, your files stay as files and the previews are stored somewhere else. So, in theory, you could do that. In practice however, I would never do that for several reasons : 1- for the same reason that you don't put databases on NFS or Samba (subtle differences in the sync behaviour of networked filesystems can destroy your data). 2- it will probably be horribly slow. Out of curiosity I put my catalog on a networked drive. Adobe devs know about point 1 above because Lightroom refuses to open it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael_charles2 Posted October 24, 2009 Share Posted October 24, 2009 <p>2 bay solution NAS are limited. You should look into 4 bay solutions. Netgear, Thecus, Synology and QNAP all offer 4 bay solutions. One that chatches the eye is Netgears ReadyNAS NV+ with 4 1TB HDD RAID-5 giving you approximately 3TB of RAW data usage. This safe and very affordable. We bought ours from <a href="http://www.mnmsystems.com/">mnmsystems.com</a> and they did all the work for us. It was out of the box and plug it in our router thats it. Both My wife with her PC and my MAC can attached to it. We would advise for anyone to consider this NAS solution</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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