Raid array hard disks.

If you are going into professional digital photography you will suddenly face the need to store all your digital images. A RAID array is the most practical and cost-effective method to have access to large quantities of digital image files.

Avoid Zip drives as backup storage. Every serious digital imaging office should have Zip drives, as a means of sending files to other people who also have Zip drives. Actually, now that you can burn a CD in 9 minutes (with an 8x CD burner such as from Smart and Friendly), it is more economical to burn a CD since everyone can read you CD's. Besides, when you send someone a Zip drive, you never get your overpriced Zip drive back. But the CD costs only about $1.

The advantages of a RAID array are primarily speed and ease of access. Do you really want to fumble around trying to find out which file is on which CD or which MO drive? Unless of course you have Cumulus image data base management software to tell you...

Here is a portion of the FLAAR. digital imaging test center in Essen, Germany.

Since the Better Light digital camera is a large format model it produces large images. To hold just a single project's worth of images it takes a RAID array (Seagate Cheetah Ultra2 SCSI LVD hard drives), additional incidental hard drives (another 72 Gigabytes worth of storage), Panasonic DVD-RAM (5.2 GB per disk), Pinnacle Micro Apex (4.6 GB per disk), plus a Panasonic CD-R burner.

Overall we need to upgrade to a newer 100 GB RAID array and upgrade to an 8x CD burner.

Especially if are new to all of this, you can get plenty of advice and assistance from the people you buy from. You can ask about RAID, about hardware RAID versus software RAID, about CD-R versus CD-RW, and get informative advice.

We recommend CD-R over CD-RW because you want to insure that your CD disks cannot be overwritten. It is an advantage to seal your CD disks so that no one, not even yourself, can change any of the files. Otherwise you will end up erasing or damaging your backup files. CDs are useful backup storage, far more economical than Zip or Jaz.

Where is the best place to get your CD-R, DVD, RAID, or hard drives? Look for a place that offers super deals, 5-year guarantee, reputable company, friendly knowledgeable people.

Design updated April 09, 2001.