In the past 4 years I have taken up the Astrophotography hobby. This has increasingly been more data hungry due to some of my multi pane mosaic projects. (One of which uses over 1TB of data). I already offloaded everything up to 2021 on a separate internal drive. The 1TB project from 2022 will not fit on the external backup drive. This puts my processing of the images on hold until I can find a storage solution.
I would prefer having all my images easily accessible on a “large” external drive as to make acquiring older projects easier if integrating them with a newer project.
Presently my data is on a tiny Crucial X6 4TB drive. This has worked great for portability. The registered Black Magic drive speed is considerably slower than what it seems should be possible (around 700mb/s) “but” I rarely notice a slowdown when working with my data either from accessing data or processing data on this external drive. (Using my 2018 MacBook Pro).
This brings me to one of the options that would somewhat future proof my hobby. Lacie makes a somewhat affordable large storage drive that uses Thunderbolt cables. LaCie 1big Dock 16TB . Since this is a mechanical drive the speed would be substantially less than a Solid State. (It is advertised at 280mb/s). I believe that if I did my data processing over the Lacie mechanical large storage drive that it would be abysmally slow, but likely all other tasks would not pose a problem. Perhaps I could store everything over the large drive but do my processing on my Crucial 6X SSD drive.
Another thought would be to figure out how Daisy Chaining works and perhaps purchase 1 powered 4TB stand in place SSD drive each year and have them chained to my MacBook so all of my data is accessible (perhaps 1 drive per each year of data). I am kind of ignorant in how this works so I don’t know whether purchasing something like a OWC drive enclosure would be necessary. In theory this would give greater speed and the affordability would be that you would need to only buy 1 drive per year.
What thoughts would you have towards future proofing the needs for a lot of storage data?