For those of you that shoot LARGE raw files

Yeah, one of my drives died on me and lost everything so I decided to go Drobo. It's been great so far. I'm using USB but just bought a Firewire 800 card and will switch to that soon.

TaDa wrote in post #11105174
...I have a quick question.

I shot with a 5D and 1D3 for a good long time, and could easily rattle off 800+ shots in a day. Now I've moved to a 5D2 that has huge raw files, and I find myself shooting many less frames. Has nothing to do with spray and pray, I just now find myself "thinking" about a shot a little more before I hit the shutter release. I'm sure a lot of it has to do with the fact that I'm running out of USB slots to attach external storage to and that the cards fill up much faster.

Just curious if this has happened to anyone else?

And yes, I know all about sRaw, just kind of in the mode of "if I have it, use it" with the large RAW files. The cropping ability of the 5D2 files is insane.

HP Home server, 3 2TB drives inside, done

To be honest I just shoot as ever - heck, I might have actually shot more shots with my 5D MK II than my 400D in the same amount of time.

With each camera I have taken more images, 40D>5D>5DII.... then again, I shoot more often then before. Still, per "event" I am shooting less and less than before.

My "library" is now at 560 gig with 460 of that in the last 12 months, or less. I do back, now and then, and delete images.

I think when the Drobo comes in I am going to remove a RAID1 pair out of my PC and just use the Drobo.

the drobo is a huge piece of crap for performance, I have one and I hate the darn thing, the most I can ever get out of it is 35MBs which is a joke

I removed all of my photos and put it on my old buffalo raid

drobo has 4 x 1TB western digital 7200 rpm green 64MB cache, 3GS Sata, and using firewire 800 I get 35MBs

buffalo has 4x 250GB IDE 8MB cache I believe 5400 rpm hard drives in raid 5 ESATA and I can get 125Mbs

one of those 1TB drives by itself can achieve 93MBs in my tests so it should easily smoke the buffalo if the drobo was not such a turd

the drobo is cool as far as expandability but I have had it tell me 3 times already that a drive died when there was no problem, and their tech support is nothing to proud about either

although they claim you can access all your data when the drive dies... yeah you can hours later after its done rebuilding, and the performance then is like using a floppy drive

I am using mine for time machine backups now, I couldnt figure out why using photoshop and lightroom was so darn slow until I realized it was the drobo slowing down the whole thing

I have the 2nd gen one, apparently the S is supposed to be better but its still slow compared to a simple mirror which is ludicrous

I just carry multiple memory cards.

I have the Drobo S up and running and it's hooked up via Esata. On large files I am getting 95mbs. I'm using it for my images now and the performance is fine. I did have an issue, when first setting it up, that was resolved by their tech support which I thought was friendly and helpful.

On average, I probably am shooting fewer frames and I'd like to think it's because I'm improving my eye and my craft.

I know I'm becoming much, much more critical and will not hesitate to trash an image unless it's either dead nutz on for technical or artistic reasons.

No room anymore for "Close Enough"

I use larger memory cards now but other than that it hasn't changed how I shoot. Maybe it contributes to why I'm more brutal now about rejecting pictures. I don't save as many bad or questionable pictures as I used to do.

I shoot full RAW + full JPG and have every one I've ever shot. Eventually I move the RAWs over to Blu Ray discs. Works for me.

I went from a 300D to a 5DII, so the quantity of data increased massively. I don't really shoot any less, but processing the files was a major bottleneck until recently, because my older PC was horribly slow, and my newer Macbook (now 3 years old) was OK, but loading up took forever in DxO. Lightroom's faster, but I prefer DxO's RAW conversion and results.

It hasn't stopped me shooting tons, but I do find that for those quick snaps I just send people the straight from camera small JPG files. I'm still post-processing RAWs from a year ago, because the unprocessed stuff was very good as is.

Good storage and a good system to process is a must; I currently upgraded to a Mac Pro hexacore (also lets met get my other hobby - audio recording - off the ground again), dumped a ton of memory in there, added an SSD as a system drive which hosts things like my lightroom catalog, but not the files, and built a RAID 0 array for the main data. All the RAW files get manually copied over to a separate internal harddisk, then there's the TimeMachine internal backup, and a backup to a RAID 1 network storage box that I'll eventually back up to an additional off-site RAID 1 network box. Or possibly go for online storage options.

As I get better I do feel comfortable being more deliberate in my shooting and taking fewer frames. But massive memory cards and hard drives have become very affordable, so I certainly don't hold back simply due to storage concerns. I'd rather waste some space to get the shot I want, as opposed to missing it because I was worrying about how much storage will be needed.

Just to add I don't think about my shots. I always have my cameras set to one shot unless I'm shooting some sort of fast action and that's not often.

Some people have questioned why I have over 350GB worth of CF cards and another 120GB of SD cards, now you see why. The 1D4, 5D2, and 7D go through memory cards like the cookie monster goes through cookies.

K6AZ wrote in post #11196826
I shoot full RAW + full JPG and have every one I've ever shot. Eventually I move the RAWs over to Blu Ray discs. Works for me.

I think it's cheaper if you buy an external HDD and move them to that.

I think I made the maths before I got my home server... BlueRay discs are so expensive (+I have neither a Blue Ray reader or writer).

DetlevCM wrote in post #11196985
I think it's cheaper if you buy an external HDD and move them to that.

I think I made the maths before I got my home server... BlueRay discs are so expensive (+I have neither a Blue Ray reader or writer).

I have three severers and a couple of NAS boxes with over 60TB of storage space and even then fill it up rapidily when I'm doing a lot of shooting. I'm getting BD-Rs for less than $1 each now so every now and then I burn some discs to free up space.

K6AZ wrote in post #11196994
I have three severers and a couple of NAS boxes with over 60TB of storage space and even then fill it up rapidily when I'm doing a lot of shooting. I'm getting BD-Rs for less than $1 each now so every now and then I burn some discs to free up space.

Less than 1$ per disc... OK.. where you you find these?

I suppose if you can get them at that price - and then have a BlueRay Burner anyway, then there might be a point.

60TBs do sound wonderful - but how do you fill those up quickly? over summer I had maybe only 500-600GB in total maximum...