Hello Everyone
I hope this post finds you all in good spirits. I’ve been pondering a crucial aspect of our workflow and would greatly appreciate your insights and experiences.
The subject of my curiosity centers around storage solutions and their optimal application in Pix4D projects. Specifically, I’m keen on understanding the benefits and drawbacks of both hybrid storage and traditional storage in the context of Pix4D projects.
I hope this post finds you all in good spirits. I’ve been pondering a crucial aspect of our workflow and would greatly appreciate your insights and experiences.
The subject of my curiosity centers around storage solutions and their optimal application in Pix4D projects. Specifically, I’m keen on understanding the benefits and drawbacks of both hybrid storage and traditional storage in the context of Pix4D projects.
Please feel free to share your experiences, case studies, recommendations, or any additional points that can shed light on that.
Thank you in advance
Hi @charleskaren732,
Thank you for your interesting question.
We have not done any official testing with any cloud or hybrid storage, but here I want to share my experience.
First, we need to differentiate between processing storage and archive storage.
Processing storage:
This is where your files are saved/created during the processing. Even if, in some cases, it is possible to process using cloud storage, this is not as stable as it needs to be. In particular, photogrammetry processing requires the creation of many temporary files that need to be sent back and forth to the cloud, slowing down the overall processing. If the files are not ready on time, this might cause a processing error.
Therefore, when possible, we always suggest keeping the data in a local drive when processing. It is better if it is on an SSD drive or/and a fast Raid0 array (there are also other solutions involving NAS drives connected with optical fiber that appear as local drives, but I won’t go too much into detail).
Archive storage:
This is where you would like to keep your processed project archived.
Projects processed with Pix4D products (but also with any other photogrammetry software) can rapidly become quite large, in particular with the latest development in camera resolution and the always larger footprints of projects. Therefore, it is understandable that you can’t keep all your projects on the processing devices/local drives. If you are using a Raid0 array, it is even more important to create a copy somewhere else, as the failure of a single hard drive will compromise the entire array.
I had good experience in keeping the projects on a Network-attached storage (NAS), so that all my projects are easily available. The same can be done with cloud storage. As long as you don’t need to process it again, it is likely to have success in opening the project directly from the cloud.
Make sure that the external/network drive or Cloud drive is mapped correctly in your OS.
Hybrid Storage:
I don’t have any experience with this, but if you can keep the data locally and upload it once finished, I don’t see any problem. Please also try to ask the same question to the manufacturer/cloud provider to see if they see any issues.
To summarize:
Processing → better if data is stored locally.
Archive → can be done on the cloud or external drives, but the responsiveness might be affected.
Let me know if this helps you. Let’s see what the rest of the Pix4D community thinks.