Farsong Blog-o-Matic - Power Computing Timeline

Photos, video, and system backups.

The internal drives I have total 300 Gb, but are redundant. It's a RAID 1 format (2x300Gb), in which the drives mirror one another, which reduces chances of hardware failure considerably. It's data redundancy. But this is beginning to feel cramped to me -- I have somewhere in the order of 50Gb-90Gb free at any one time (it varies directly with the amount of video on the drive array).

I have far too much music in general, and it'd be nice to convert more of my DVDs to an iPod-ready format.

More than that, though, I shoot video and still photography, and I draw things.

Standard DV footage is about 1Gb/4minutes (250Mb/Min) in an uncompressed DV format on the computer. You can imagine that this would eat up disk space quickly. It's also why I keep all my source tapes.

It's also bad form to import DV footage to the same drive that you run the applications and OS from. Not because it doesn't work, but because there's a significant performance hit because of all the reading and writing to the drive, and a HDD's head can only move so quickly. Ideally, I should have one drive for the footage I'm working with, another drive for the "scratch" or rendered video, and the third from which I run the OS and the application.

These also need to be fast drives, in terms of RPMs, the hard drive bus (usually SATA these days) can handle the data, but if the drive can't spin and write fast enough, frames will be dropped. One of my friends experienced this first hand, importing DV footage to his Dell laptop. Laptop drives just don't spin fast enough to keep up with DV footage -- at least the 4200 RPM drives of the past few years. When we plugged in a scratch drive, the computer could actually import and edit footage, albeit rather begrudgingly with its meagre 512Mb of RAM.


My camera is takes 10 Megapixel shots, too. I normally shoot in JPG, but the size of these is still on average between 3 and 4 Mb apiece. The 8 Gb card I shoot with lets me take almost 2000 shots in JPG format, but if I switch to RAW (which I really should do), I can fit about a quarter of that number -- about 450 images/8Gb or about 55/Gb in RAW. I have not yet filled my card completely, but I should get some other cards, too, for safety. It would be smarter to trust eight separate 1Gb cards than one 8Gb card.

But I have photos dating back a ways, and a fairly large library of photos as well. I don't know the size off-hand, but it's about 15k. Admittedly, a lot of these are useless photos, but I like having all of them, because the whole showing of photos, good and bad, helps establish the zeitgeist of when the photos were taken.

And drawing things takes up space, too; I usually scan things at about 600dpi, and though I have been saving to zipped TIFF files which are smaller than Photoshop files, full-resolution scans take up a large amount of space.


I could have probably stated that more simply: Archival, storage, and backup of video and photos. But I like explaining, too. So long as it's not too much to read.

Um ... that was about 15k photos, not some other number.


Also, this naturally all hinges around the ability to make money. If not, the setup I have now is sufficient for another year or so, but the external drive I have is rather sketchy.

And I should probably move the new tablet further up on the list, as the one I have is partially broken and aggravates me.


And balancing money also means balancing things I do with others, which includes thinking about things like cons. True to form, like most, I have very little money, so I do need to to plan ahead significantly. I'm working on the "getting a job" bit, though, so I will actually have a positive cashflow.

Yup. The wonderful and terrible things about digital photography is how easy it is to take obscene numbers of photos. For every 20 pictures I post to flickr (or my blog, here), I shoot easily twice that number. That ratio does seem to be dropping.

But there's still the archival of photos from Newspaper my senior year, and a vast number of the photos from this summer at camp. I think I averaged some 24000 shutter presses for the summer (eleven weeks, which by the end of I despised the Canon PowerShot that I had used).