As someone who’s been a geek most of his life, the last few days have been a stressful period. As a photographer, I store my images on a network-attached storage drive or NAS drive with RAID 1 hard disks.

My previous QNAP TS-420 has been running 24×7 for five years now and performed flawlessly but is starting to get a little long in the tooth in electronic years. Like a dog who ages seven years for every actual year, electronics are probably worse.

Initially, my old NAS just stored primarily financial documents which are not much of a burden on the drive. Photo images are getting larger with every new release of a camera. My RAW images have grown from 20 MB to 50 MB in size. Even JPG’s are now approaching 20 MB in size.

The TS-420 has worked well storing electronic images but has to work extra hard to read and write the huge RAW files. LightRoom would pause for a few seconds every time it had to deal with one of the files.

Continue reading “Progress is Painful” →