Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

I think it's rather a hoarder issue or 'image attachment disorder'. I average probably 1000 digital images for every 6+ hours of shooting wildlife, airshows, similar. But, I aggressively cull, keeping and editing maybe 3% to 8% of all images. 50 images of a blue bird, with maybe 10 really in a good pose and super sharp still only needs 3 or 4 unique versions, the rest deleted. One must delete as many frames as needed to succeed. If you can't isolate and identify your best work, you'll never even be good.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

When I do decide to machine gun it on occasion, I usually delete most of them.

Does anyone really need a ton of images of one animal in various poses?

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

That’s a complex subject. There are motor failures, actuator/head failures and electronic failures. Many years ago when drive spindle bearings were actually lubricated, we saw mechanical spindle/“sticksion” failures, but modern drives have air bearings so motor/spindle failures are less frequent. It’s not unusual to see modern drives operate for many, many years 24x7x365. Electronic and actuator/head failures are a different matter. I had 16 Fujitsu enterprise class drives run 24x7 for >10 years in a NetApp NAS in my basement without a drive failure until I shut down the array for a few days, and upon restarting 3 drives failed. It’s for that reason in Y2K (for those that remember), the major storage manufacturers were telling customers NOT to shut down their storage because we would be overwhelmed by failures.

It is a fact that many electronic failures occur on power up. Also, when I was at DataDirect (who built the world’s fastest storage) we dissected a number of drives that failed on start up, and one phenomena we found was that certain models parked the heads on the outer tracks at shutdown and that is where debris from the platter accumulates as it flakes off the media, so the heads would get stuck in the debris.

Long story short, when I was running spinning disks, I personally preferred to keep them online 24x7x365, but now since I exclusively run SSDs, it’s not an issue for me anymore.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

I guess there is some heat conduction to the drive mounting, but my guess is it’s minimal. The key is airflow across the drive.

Picture Taker Loc: Michigan Thumb

"CHG CANON" said it.

photoman43

My WD and Seagate failures were not tied to continual use. I use them mainly to transfer images between a laptop and a desktop or when I am backing up images downloaded to my laptop. They are plugged in only when the transfers or backups occur.

I am super anal about removing the External drive only after I have received the “safe to remove” notice when I click on that command in the bottom toolbar in win 10.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Ever notice that when incandescent light bulbs blow, most of the time it's when they are turned on.

ncribble Loc: Albuquerque, NM

Stop! If you are thinking 2TB, and pay the difference for twice or three times that amount of storage.

RightOnPhotography Loc: Quebec,QC

Exactly. I will second this motion.

bwana Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada

I have 2x4TB, 2x2TB and one 1TB external HD's, all Western Digital, and have great success with them. The oldest is ten years old and still working just fine. I also have a Lacie 500GB SSD for the road.

Definitely consider two of whatever you purchase. Always good to have a double backup (or more).

bwa

Picture Taker Loc: Michigan Thumb

I will never AGAIN not have a single drive with back-up. Drive DO DIE and then what. Hundreds to try tho recover it.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

?? Double or triple negative??

Please define "single drive with backup".
I have one drive in my PC and <multiple> backups of it.

Picture Taker Loc: Michigan Thumb

All drives die, if you want to be safe have two drives with the same thing on them. If or when open fails you have the info on the other so you can buy a new drive and copy all of it so you continue the have 2 set of ALL you info.