Professional storage devices: From 1TB to 12TB

I believe that you can't have too much storage. That's doubly so if like me you're a photographer who seems to generate gigabytes of new stuff.

While I have offloaded some of my backup needs to the cloud, I still need local storage. Here are the storage devices that I'm currently using, ranging from things that will fit into your pocket to things that will totally dominate your desk!

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For a few years now I've been a fan of Western Digital My Passport drives. They're small, fast, and reliable. Given my happy past experiences with these external drives, I was excited when Western Digital sent me a pair of 2TB My Passport Pro.

Unlike the My Passport drives which house a single drive, the My Passport Pro houses two drives. This makes them thicker, but the two drives have benefits. Using the supplied software you can configure these drives as RAID 0 or RAID 1 (depending on whether you want speed or data duplication) or you can set them to appear as separate drives.

The My Passport Pro comes equipped with Thunderbolt connectivity, and the cable is attached, which is great because it means I don't have to buy one, and won't lose the one supplied! This drive delivers transfer rates as high as 233 MB/s, so it's no slouch. The drive also gets power from the Thunderbolt connector so there's no separate AC adaptor to carry (or lose).

(Source: Western Digital)

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G-RAID is a dual drive, professional RAID 0 storage solution with high-speed USB 3.0 and FireWire interfaces.

Designed for professional content creation applications, G-RAID supports simultaneous playback of multiple layers of HDV/DVCPRO HD ProRes 422 HQ with the leading video editing applications, including Apple Final Cut Pro, AVID Media Composer and Adobe Premiere.

An all aluminum enclosure, soft power switch and quiet smart fan round out G-RAID’s professional feature set.

A solid piece of kit. Not really portable as it needs a power adapter, but great for editing back at home or in the office.

(Source: G-Technology)

Sometimes a few gigabytes of storage space are not enough, and you need to start thinking in terabytes!

Enter the Western Digital My Passport drive.

I love the 2TB My Passport. It's small, relatively fast thanks to USB 3.0 connectivity, and doesn't need an external power supply.

I use this when on the road, and back it up to separately to another external hard drive, a NAS box, and to the cloud.

(Source: Western Digital)

I remember a time when I dreamt of owning a 1TB hard drive. Now you can fit 1TB of storage into a pocket!

The Kingston DataTraveler HyperX Predator combines colossal capacities – up to 1TB – with incredible performance – read speeds of 240MB/s and write speeds of 160MB/s.

This is a monstrous drive that feels more like a metal ingot in your pocket than a flash drive. I'll be honest with you though, if you have to ask what the price is – over $1,000 for the 1TB version – then this drive isn't for you!

(Source: Kingston)

I like Apple's Time Machine backup tool, but I fine Time Capsule devices too expensive if you have more than a couple of Macs. So what I've done is done for an external drive that I can utilize as a makeshift Time Capsule.

I use a 3TB Western Digital My Book specifically for this job. It's small, quiet and discreet, and works well for my needs.

(Source: Western Digital)

I've opted for a massive 12TB Western Digital My Book Duo as the main place where my photos and videos are stored. This features two drives which I've chosen to use RAID 1 to give me redundancy – just in case something does wrong.

In the event of a drive failing, I can replace them easily – just pop the top off, lift out the drive, and pop the new one in.

Because the My Book Duo has a couple of USB 3.0 ports on the back, I can daisy chain my My Book to the My Book Duo, so I save a USB port on my system.

(Source: Western Digital)

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