Storage for photos.

shaynemawer

shaynemawer

shaynemawer

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uk
Hi all, i am after some suggestions for storing photos on a hard drive. I'm thinking that an ssd or nvme in an external enclosure, would like the option for it to be portal. I have on my motherboard
  1. USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps Type-A
  2. USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20Gbps Type-C

guessing the 20gbps is quicker, but how much speed do you lose when using externally usb rather then connected as normal direct to motherboard?
one problem i have, would be getting some photos of my old pc which will only have an early usb version on it, before i take it to the tip.
then maybe also, keeping a back up on either usb sticks or sd cards ?.

which way would offer the most protection
 
What size do you need first and foremost.

And I don't think you saturate 10Gbps with photos as the files are too small.

And you don't lose much if any via USB unless the ssd is pcie gen 3 or more. But as I stated you won't get those speeds transfering tiny files any way.

500MB/s is fast by almost anyone's standards for photo transfers. I'll be surprised if you can even that.
 
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Get the cheaper drive but get two of them. One as a backup copy of the other. Really only large files like video where you notice the extra speed.
 
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Your old PC will have USB-A connectors so any external drive will work with it, given a suitable cable, but at a reduced speed.

You need to look more seriously at your backup plan. If possible, it would be better to have the primary storage inside the computer case then at least one external drive as backups. The backup drives do not need to be SSDs so should be relatively cheap. I would not consider USB sticks or SD cards to be suitable long-term storage.

Buy at least 1TB straight away; don't mess about with anything smaller as the cost difference is smaller than the hassle of upgrading later.

I just tried copying 20GB of photos from an internal NVMe drive to an external one and was getting 450MBps. Copying back to the internal drive gave 780GBps which quite surprised me. This was on 10Gbps port so the limitation seems to be the USB-to-NVMe chipset. The files were between 10MB to 20MB each so I'm not sure if that's what @kona786 considers tiny.
 
Snapshot said:
Your old PC will have USB-A connectors so any external drive will work with it, given a suitable cable, but at a reduced speed.

You need to look more seriously at your backup plan. If possible, it would be better to have the primary storage inside the computer case then at least one external drive as backups. The backup drives do not need to be SSDs so should be relatively cheap. I would not consider USB sticks or SD cards to be suitable long-term storage.

Buy at least 1TB straight away; don't mess about with anything smaller as the cost difference is smaller than the hassle of upgrading later.

I just tried copying 20GB of photos from an internal NVMe drive to an external one and was getting 450MBps. Copying back to the internal drive gave 780GBps which quite surprised me. This was on 10Gbps port so the limitation seems to be the USB-to-NVMe chipset. The files were between 10MB to 20MB each so I'm not sure if that's what @kona786 considers tiny.
Click to expand...


ah might look at going this way then, NVMe inside computer and then get files transferred onto that, then find an external drive to keep as a back up.
 
I bought a Ugreen USB-C SATA enclosure off Amazon. Cheap but offers really good performance. There is a Samsung 8TB SSD in it and can write to it at 470MB/s. This is the system I use for backing up my photos. External SSD synchronised over from the internal NVMe storage in the PC.

I also have a USB-C M.2 version which is 10Gbps which works nicely too but only use that for M.2 cloning.
 
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