Cold Storage
Sunday. It’s sunny and clear again. A very, very quiet day. Vanessa’s working, and Milo is still away in London. Raff went out to church late morning, and he’s meeting up with a friend for lunch later. Gubs and Dash, like me, are just pottering happily. Milo arrived home around six, fully plunged, and full of stories. Roast chicken for supper, then Gubs, Dash and I watched a couple of movies.
In the afternoon I’d begun tackling a thorny issue I’ve been putting off for a while: storage. The data kind, not the box-under-the-bed kind. Technically, I suppose both could be true, but that’s not the point here. Reluctantly, I’m going to have to buy a new Mac for my photography work. My usual play with tech is to buy the good stuff and get ten years out of it — it’s a tactic that has worked well for me in the past, but times, they are a-changin’.
My 27-inch 5K Retina iMac from 2018 was a beast in its day. It is starting to show its age, and protests noisily at heavy loads — such as opening a second tab in Chrome — but it could probably hang on for another couple of years. Sadly, its Intel heart is bringing the crunch point closer. Macs switched over to the admittedly superior Apple Silicon processors in 2020, and we’ve reached the point where the older tech is no longer being supported. Adobe Lightroom will no longer update, and I doubt Photoshop is far behind it. Things still work, for now, but it’s only a matter of time before something breaks, a vital plug-in stops working, or a genuinely useful new capability is not supported. Hence the imperative to upgrade.
But times have really changed. The old maxim “storage is cheap”, often used a decade ago, is now very far from the truth. Whether you blame it on AI data centres, cryptocurrency miners, COVID, Brexit, or just general corporate encrappening, data storage is now eye-wateringly pricey. A modern Mac Mini, a tiny hockey-puck of a thing that is actually all you need for photo-editing these days, comes with 512GB SSD storage built in. My iPhone has twice that. If I wanted to push that up to 2TB, less than I have in my old iMac, it will cost me £800 more, doubling the price of the machine.
So, that’s the long-winded origin story to my current quest for storage. My hope is that by separating the parts, I can return to my original strategy of buying well, and not buying often: a decent desktop RAID box, with built-in tolerance of disk failure, to safely hold my 20-year accumulation of photos, and a fast external SSD drive for Lightroom’s workspace and previews. In theory, this will allow me to buy the bargain-basement, off-the-shelf, Mac Mini of the moment, and change it painlessly whenever I need to. The little box of compute can come and go, while the rest of the system — storage, monitor, keyboard, mouse — can soldier on for years. No plan ever truly survives contact with the enemy, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that most of this will work.
