I guess I was assuming people don't just copy 'whatever' to storage. My backup devices are always pruned so I wasn't advocating dumping everything to disk and ignoring it.

She'd want a way to catalog or it is like an expensive /dev/nul

__________________
Visit my blog for Festool adventures.
Shirt size: L Twitter: @HalfInchShy

As for technology, I think SATA (eSATA for external) is the fastest, with USB 3.0 close on the heals.

I think I am in a similar situation to your wife, in that for every 1 picture I use, I have a dozen scrap pictures or brackets to match. I don't throw these away because I have found myself going back through them years later looking for other uses.

To me, it is not about storage size, but about organization. I manage these photos myself, so I have an intense dislike for any software that tries to automatically load all of my pictures into some sort of composite system. My bulk camera pictures go into a separate directory for each project, and only those pictures that are used get copied into a more active directory. Those bulk directories may never get viewed again, but I never throw them away either. The last thing I want is for some piece of software to load all of these bulk pictures into their idea of a photo album.

The storage space needed for pictures is trivial. How you use it is far more critical to productivity.

Thank you for all of your suggestions and comments. My wife's computer is a MacBook Pro. She saves almost every image she takes. It is common for her to go back to an old photo to print it, send to someone or . . . ) She is currently making books for our grandchildren and hence wants to find some older pictures. I have not really paid attention in the past but it appears she does not have an orginized filing system. They are saved in a folder with the date they were downloaded from the card and a word or two about what the bulk of them are, there will be some that are unrelated to those words. (Glad she does not read this forum - she would kill me)

Ouch, then all that would be left of you is a folder named 'him' with some random photos. Sad, really.

__________________
Visit my blog for Festool adventures.
Shirt size: L Twitter: @HalfInchShy

That can change exponentially once the grandchildren (and great-grandchildren) start arriving.


.

__________________
John

• eSATA is offered at 3 Gbps and 6 Gbps speeds. It's pretty easy to find adapters for it, and sometimes it's a built-in connection. eSATA will disappear as Thunderbolt becomes widely available, but it's probably a safe choice for the next 2 to 3 years.
  
• Firewire (aka 1394) is either 3 Gbps (Firewire 400) or 6 Gbps (Firewire 800). It's long been a favorite for media work on Macs, but is now made obsolete by Thunderbolt. Expect Firewire to disappear.
  
• USB 3.0 is 5 Gbps, roughly 10x the speed of USB 2.0. It's getting easier to find; expect all non-Apple computers to have it in the future. Unless Apple drops USB entirely (unlikely in the next few years), expect them to move to USB 3.0 as well.
  
• Thunderbolt at 10 Gbps is 66% faster than eSATA and 100% faster than USB 3.0. That's a single Thunderbolt channel. Current implementations provide two channels.
  
  Thunderbolt is an Intel design, with the collaboration of Apple. Apple has an exclusive on it for now--kind of like the iPhone and AT&T--but Intel intends it to be universally used. Acer and Asus will release the first Thunderbolt-enabled PCs in 2012, Intel has revealed.

__________________
Posterous should be along shortly. Preposterous is already here!

Thanks again for your help. I've ordered a Western Digital 6TB My Book Studio Edition. It has Firewire 800 port as does my wife's MAC. It supports both RAID 0 and Raid 1. I do not really know much about RAID but from reading Wikipedia I think RAID 1 writes a file to two drives so that if one drive fails the file is not lost. Is that correct?

That's right, Tom. Raid level 0 provides faster performance by spreading a file across more than one drive, Raid level 1 provides redundancy by mirroring a file across more than one drive.

RAID level 5 provides the best balance of capacity and performance while providing data redundancy. RAID 5 provides redundancy by striping data across three or more disks and keeping the parity information on one of the disks in each stripe. In case of disk failure, the surviving disks and the parity disk are used to reconstruct the lost data, providing data transparently to the user application. When the failed disk has been replaced with a good disk, the reconstructed data is written out to the new disk; when the reconstruction (or sometimes referred as RESYNC) process is complete, the volume returns to a redundant state. The capacity of a RAID 5 volume is the smallest disk in the RAID set multiplied by one less than the number of disks in the RAID set. For example, a four-disk RAID 5 set provides the capacity of three disks, assuming all four disks are identical in size.

With my ReadyNas (set at RAID level 5 with 4 drives) it will sense a problem with a drive and send me an email. If 1 or 2 drives fail, I can "hot swap" new drives, and after some time for reorganization everything will be back to normal. Should 3 or 4 drives fail at the same time I'm out of luck. It is rare to have more than 1 drive fail at the same time, and I keep a couple of new drives on hand so that I can swap at the first sign of trouble.

.

__________________
John

The beauty of Raid is the safety provided by whatever scheme it's using to take care of a disk failure, but beware the raid/disk controller failure..........