Scanned Slide Storage

bobgreen1 · #1 01-05-2008, 02:11 PM

I'm doing a typical old-guy project: scanning about 6,000 slides dating back to the....well, before Viet Nam, let's say. Since my Scanner produces a file of 50 to 55 MB per TIFF image, stacking CD's with 12 per CD seems daunting--even silly. I have a small pile already. I've been doing some research on external hard drives, and 500 GB seems to be a size that will be more than enough for the project, but it's hard to cut through all the computer babble and user "reviews." What I will probably be doing is creating some slide shows and culling the herd for printable "winners." My computer was built for me in 2006 and I believe the USB ports are 1.0.
So here are my questions:

1) Can someone recommend a brand that seems to be reliable, simple to use, relatively inexpensive and reads and writes reasonably quickly? I'd like to keep the cost well under $200.
2)Do the drives come preformatted? If not, how is that done?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Bob Green

Frank Lopes · #2 01-05-2008, 02:34 PM

Bob,

I have several like this one and I'm very happy with them.
If you don't use Firewire, you can have it for even less money.

It comes formatted and with basic software that you can use to backup stuff from your system to it.

Regarding your comment on USB 1.0: if your system was put together in 2006, it probably has USB 2.0, unless someone went out of their way to give you 1.0
2.0 has been the standard for quite a while

Quote:

Originally Posted by bobgreen1

I'm doing a typical old-guy project: scanning about 6,000 slides dating...
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Thanks in advance for any help.

mistermonday · #3 01-05-2008, 06:19 PM

Bob, welcome to RetouchPRO!
You can now get a Western Digital or Maxtor 500GB external drive at Costco for $149. For about $250 you can get 1 Terabyte (1000 GigaBytes)!! These are robust reliable drives from companies who have been in the HD business for a long time. You can also find these drives in your local PC store - they are pretty standard everywhere.
If your machine was built in 2006 it is very unlikely to have USB 1 unless someone gave you some old surplus USB card or P3 motherboard. Even if that is the case, you can add in a USB 2 card for a few bucks.
The other thing you can do is put a DVD burner in your computer. The std DVD holds 4.7GB of data and costs about 25 - 50 cents per DVD. A DVD burner (internal to the PC) costs under $50. That being said, the external USB hard drive is thousands of times faster.
Good luck with your scanning.
Refards, Murray

Stephen A · #4 01-05-2008, 06:49 PM

Based on your figures, that's roughly 322GB of photos (6000 @ 55 / 1024). You're right, a 500GB should work fine - but there's a few things to keep in mind... like the old saying, "Don't put all of your eggs in one basket".

What if the drive crashes? In my limited experience I've seen IDE crash more often than SATA - which you may want to consider. Also, SATA is faster than IDE (higher bandwidth, especially if you go with Firewire).

I'm going to guess you're scanning them in at 1200DPI (or there abouts). With that in mind, I would approximate such a scan at 90 seconds each (please correct if inaccurate). That's just under 7 days of constant labour. I guess if you're retired that's not a big deal, but also something you'll want to keep in mind.

Anyways, if I were going to do this I would store them redundantly. Sure, you'll spend twice as much on hard drives (two hard drives)... but for me personally it's worth 150 hours of my work time to make sure my work is safe. Also, if you're taking the time to scan in 6000 photos you may want to consider storing the hard drives in a fire/watertight safe.

Hope the above helps!

Jerryb · #5 01-05-2008, 08:48 PM

hi,
well it looks like you already have some suggestions on what drive...

some additional thoughts...
a. as far as partitioning and formatting... some hard drive do come preformatted.... if not there several website that address that this is just one of them....
http://reviews.ebay.co.uk/How-to-For...00000002056368

note: with such a large hard drive... you probably want it to be ntfs and not fat32 ..... unless you want a lot of partitions..

another thought is that you may want to get a good graphic manager program , if you don't have one, to help categorize your images... you may want to ask what other people have... my self i like GWSpro (shareware) alchemymindworks.com .. it's invaluable for me.. in addition, something to think about... you can easily add caption below the image and not on.... I hate trying to remember what a picture was about.. smiling... other choices... irfanview.com or xnview.com maybe picassa all those are free...

those are my thoughts...

Quote:

Originally Posted by bobgreen1

I'm doing a typical old-guy project: scanning about 6,000 slides dating back to the....well, before Viet Nam, let's say. Since my Scanner produces a file of 50 to 55 MB per TIFF image, stacking CD's with 12 per CD seems daunting--even silly. I have a small pile already. I've been doing some research on external hard drives, and 500 GB seems to be a size that will be more than enough for the project, but it's hard to cut through all the computer babble and user "reviews." What I will probably be doing is creating some slide shows and culling the herd for printable "winners." My computer was built for me in 2006 and I believe the USB ports are 1.0.
So here are my questions:

1) Can someone recommend a brand that seems to be reliable, simple to use, relatively inexpensive and reads and writes reasonably quickly? I'd like to keep the cost well under $200.
2)Do the drives come preformatted? If not, how is that done?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Bob Green

bobgreen1 · #6 01-06-2008, 09:41 AM

Thank you all for your sane and sound advice.

A further question or two on formatting and file management:
1) I'm inferring that because FAT 32 has multiple partitions the the time it takes the computer to find and display a file is greater than with the NTFS format? Are these time differences significant (fractions of seconds versus seconds or minutes) or the kinds of differences that only the most finicky would argue about?
2) The windows program for "my photos" seems to work nicely and my photoshop program works nicely with it too. I've seen Picassa, and the systems that come bundled with various cameras and printers but never felt the need to use them. Do they have advantages that I'm missing? I date and label each box of 36 or 24 slides as a folder as I go.

I'm a bit concerned about a single storage device, but I think that as I edit and scan, I'll probably keep truly good stuff on discs too, and since I'm pretty hard on myself, that pile won't get too big. And if the unit screws up, I'll have another winter project. And by then I probably won't remember that I did it in the first place.
Thanks again.

Bob Green

Frank Lopes · #7 01-06-2008, 11:36 AM

I'll try to answer your questions within your workflow context and not from
the perspective of what I do for a living:

Performance:
The differences in speed between FAT32 and NTFS are so small that I wouldn't worry about. If the drive size was 2gb or less ( do you remember those times ? ), then FAT32 would have a clear advantage. Today it really doesn't make much of a difference.

Doing a windows search for an item in a folder with 10,000 others will take longer than looking for that item in a folder with only 1,000. However considering the number of images that you will ultimately end up with, I would recommend that you invest in a piece of software to catalog your images ( digital access management ) . It will make your life much easier.

The huge advantage that these programs have is the fact that they allow you to "tag" the images with keywords so you can later on search them based on those keywords.

Let's assume you have scanned a couple thousand slides and have organized in in folders by year and sub-folders by month. Within each folder there will be probably several different topics: friends, family, vacations, events, celebrations etc.

Regardless of where you save these files, be it one folder, multiple folders, one drive or multiple drives, when you do a search for "birthday" for example, you will get all the images that meet that criteria.

The thing to remember is that, the magic to make this happen, is in the tagging logic: you will need to have the discipline to look at each image and decide if the primary classification is "family" and then "vacations" or is it "event" and then "vacation". Only you will be able to decide what the appropriate scheme should be.

Regarding your concerns how long the drive will last:
Unfortunately your drive, just as all drives, WILL die. It is not matter of if it is a matter of when. The faster all of us get used to the idea that hard drives be it internal or external all have a finite life span, the better off we are.

Different drive technologies have different "life expectancies": generalizing, SATA drives are slightly better than IDE and SCSI are better still.

It sounds like this project is pretty important to you...

If I were "in your shoes", I wouldn't consider doing it without redundant storage, meaning, at least 2 hard drives and wouldn't get to concerned about FAT32 or NTFS evenstill there are very important differences.

Let us know how it goes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bobgreen1

Thank you all for your sane and sound advice.

A further question or two on formatting and file management:
1) I'm inferring that because FAT 32 has multiple partitions the the time it takes the computer to find and display a file is greater than with the NTFS format? Are these time differences significant (fractions of seconds versus seconds or minutes) or the kinds of differences that only the most finicky would argue about?
2) The windows program for "my photos" seems to work nicely and my photoshop program works nicely with it too. I've seen Picassa, and the systems that come bundled with various cameras and printers but never felt the need to use them. Do they have advantages that I'm missing? I date and label each box of 36 or 24 slides as a folder as I go.

I'm a bit concerned about a single storage device, but I think that as I edit and scan, I'll probably keep truly good stuff on discs too, and since I'm pretty hard on myself, that pile won't get too big. And if the unit screws up, I'll have another winter project. And by then I probably won't remember that I did it in the first place.
Thanks again.

Bob Green

rmx101 · #8 02-07-2008, 12:22 PM

Hi all. I notice plenty of mention about reliability of external / local hard drives, the issues on Fat32 vs NTFS or MAC osx, etc.

Anyone considered using a secure online image archive?
Have a look at http://pixelide.com/image_workspace.php

The service offers large online storage without any limits on file sizes. Pricing is quite reasonable considering you don't need extra softwares to manage the image archive. Everything is done via their Image Workspace.

Organizing, managing, distributing or sharing large image files is done seamlessly from Pixelide's online imaging solution. May work out very well in the case mentioned here.
Wish you best!

Dave.Cox · #9 02-07-2008, 02:30 PM

For storing a large amount of photos like this, I like to burn them off to a DVD or a RAM DVD.

bobgreen · #10 02-07-2008, 03:55 PM

Just to follow up. Got a Maxtor 500 GB. It blinks nicely and slows down the boot up, but so far so good. (It even dims in sync with classical music streams) I have gotten the redundancy lecture from some others, notably A. Wrotniak (I'm an Olympus shooter), but I'm living on the wild side until the inevitable question comes up next Christmas: Dad, what can we get you.........And by then 500 GB may be going for under $100.

Thanks again, all.

Bob Green