A lot of you are already using hard drives for long term data (image) storage.  Let's look at some of the costs and how to save some cash.  After all, spending money on storage isn't sexy.

An external hard drive (enclosure) is a container for a bare (or internal) hard drive that uses a "bridge chip" to allow conversion from the native drive format (currently SATA) to Firewire 400, 800 or USB.  In addition to paying for the storage on the drive, you are also buying the design, marketing, packaging, shipping, metal or plastic shell, power supply and often an assortment of clutter cables.

At the time this post was written, a 1Tb LaCie external hard drive costs about $250 from online vendors.  That comes out to .25¢ per gigabyte.

A bare 1tb pro grade hard drive like Seagate Barracuda currently costs about $120 from online vendors.  That comes out to 12¢ per gigabyte.

That works out to about half the storage cost going to the enclosure.  If you don’t mind paying for all those extras, an enclosure does provide easy portability and protection.  They are cool looking (in a glowy eyed, Battlestar Galactica kind of way) when they're all stacked on top of each other generating heat and consuming power.

The average commercial photo shoot that we service generates about 50 gigs of Raw data.  That breaks down to each drive holding 20 average commercial photo shoots.  Adding redundancy by creating a backup of each drive will double the storages cost.  So after you back it up, you have safely stored your data for approximately $12 per shoot.

When you are buying bare hard drives, most major brands are good choices just be sure to choose drives with 3 or 5 year warranties instead of the consumer drives with 1 year warranties.  Those drives with longer warranties are usually quality controlled better and made for demanding markets.

We have blogged about our archiving systems before and shown you how we store and access bare hard drives.  In the next archiving article I will show you options for getting data onto your bare drives including tray-less enclosures and adapters.