I guess I knew this day was coming.  When I decided to start shooting RAW, I knew it would be memory intensive… and it has been.  I have had no regrets whatsoever.  It was the right decision to make, and has allowed me to better control the color and attributes of my photos without loosing integrity of the digital negative.

As I have taken more photos in RAW, my files and folders have grown to large sizes.  Since I keep these photos by year on my computer, my computer has started to bear the brunt of this this volume, bogging down my computer.  I had to find a solution to get all those memory extensive photos off my 1tB computer, and put them off computer, yet readily still accessible.  I back up all my photos on an external drive.. and these days 3-4 tB drives are cheaper than ever.  But to connect and spool up an external drive every time I was to access my photos is time extensive, and didn’t seem practical.

So I started reading about RAID’s: Redundant Array of Independent Disks. These back up units allow you to put independent internal disk drives in the unit, and allow one to mirror data for backup within the unit, yet it can sit on your desk or elsewhere and act as a easily accessible drive unit to backup and store my memory intensive photo files.

Done.

 

 

Enter Drobo 5D. With 5 separate internal disk slots, and 16tB of memory  it solves my problem and allows me to store my RAW photos off computer and free up valuable computer space to do, well .. computing, Photoshop, etc.  So far so good.