Nick Rains is a professional photographer, the Leica Akademie Principal Instructor and a Master Photographer of the Australian Institute of Professional Photography.
Nick is renowned for his travel and documentary photography capturing subjects such as sports, news, celebrities, industry, travel, fashion and portraits. He’s been featured in publications such as Australian Geographic, Australian Photography Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Reader’s Digest and more. He has also worked for commercial clients Shell, BBC, Orion, Ponant and the Australian Government.
In addition to his photography work, his website and workshops are a resource for teaching fellow photographers about the technology and techniques he uses as part of his photography kit.
Workflow reaching maximum capacity
Recently, he found himself reaching a tipping point in his current workflow as he was running out of storage for his vast catalogue containing over 300,000 images. He previously used a four-bay NAS system, filled with 4TB drives, which was almost at capacity. It was time to upgrade.
He chose to replace the drives with Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB models – not only for their reliability and feature set but also for the 5-year warranty and 2 years of Seagate Rescue Data Recovery. This extra peace of mind covers any mechanical, accidental or natural disaster that prevents a drive from working properly. Should the situation arise, all Nick would have to do is send the drive to Seagate and their technicians will take it apart and attempt recovery to a new disk. Backed by Seagate’s 40 years of data storage experience, there is a 90% success rate of in-house recovery.
Seagate IronWolf Pro drives are designed specifically for 24/7 performance and are rated at a 1.2 Million hour MTBF. In a system under heavy use, this allows for superior confidence in drive reliability. Seagate’s AgileArray technology, a set of hardware, firmware, and software features, provides further improved performance and the drive’s Advanced AcuTrac Technology improves vibration tolerance with Duel Plane Balance for quiet operation.
How Nick upgraded from 4TB drives to 14TB drives
Check out the video below — Nick talks through his thinking and the steps to upgrade his drives.
Initially, Nick was concerned that the jump from 4TB drives to 14TB drives would be an arduous process, but he soon discovered it was, in fact, rather simple. He thought that it may be necessary to remove all the data from the NAS, replace the drives and then copy it all back but quickly discovered it was far easier. In his QNAP NAS system, the drives could be hot-swapped while still being used in his day-to-day work.
Upon removing an old 4TB drive, he replaced it with a 14TB Seagate IronWolf Pro drive. The NAS would then rebuild its internal database taking up to 12 hours. He would then repeat the process until all four drives had been replaced. At this stage, all that was needed was to expand the capacity within the NAS Dashboard software. After a final lengthy database rebuild, he now had access to the full capacity of the drives. The long rebuild times are essential to avoid any data corruption and since it didn’t hamper his workflow, the disruption was negligible.
For Nick Rains, Seagate’s IronWolf Pro drives were the perfect solution for solving his storage capacity limitations. Not only was his upgrade to 14TB drives performed seamlessly but he can also rest assured that if something goes wrong with a drive in the future, his data is well protected.
