This afternoon I began the process of upgrading my RAID-1 mirrored system that houses my entire photo archive.  For the past two years, my photos have lived on a Sans Digital RAID box (just like this G-Tech model at B&H) consisting of dual 500gb drives.  The only problem is that I’ve been using a 5D Mark II for almost a year, and I capture in RAW.  With the addition of a 7D, and with Adobe soon to release an update to Lightroom to officially support its RAW files (there is a beta), I’m about to have 18 megapixel RAW files, too.  What’s kind of amazing is that I haven’t needed to expand the capacity of the drive sooner, but I delete a lot of my outtakes.

It’s two in the morning now and the process began around 3pm.  The new 1.5 terabyte drive had to be formatted (I don’t believe in the “quick format” to initialize a new drive), then my 410 gigs of images had to be copied over.  Now the drive is in the process of copying the image of one disk onto the other–it’s format, data, etc.

I would heartily recommend a RAID system to anyone–granted, RAID 5 or the Drobo would be even better.  However, either of those alternatives require more than two disks at a time, and I’m trying to save on money and space at the moment.  For the mean time, I’m just happy to have a terabyte to grow into on top of the 400+ gigs I’m already using.  Now to figure out my back-up solution for the 1.5 TB system…