Sony A7R V What Storage Will I Need?

[Richard A]

I'm going on a 6 week road trip in the middle of Spring, in a couple of months. I'm going to be limited to about 1.5TB of computer storage to take with me. At the moment I have a 160GB CFexpress card & a 128GB SD card. As well as photos, I'm intending on taking quite a bit of video & hopefully, quite a few timelapse videos. How much storage do you think I will need? I have been looking at maybe getting one of these. Price seems pretty reasonable:

960GB OWC Atlas Pro High-Performance CFexpress 4.0 Type A Memory Card

Any help is much appreciated.

 

[Richard A]

Thanks for your reply. The "all eggs in one basket" thing had occurred to me too. All the cards I'm using at the moment are Lexar. OWC primarily do Apple Mac stuff. Being a Mac user, I have been buying stuff from them for over 25 years. Over that time I have used over a dozen or more of just their drive housings alone & never had a problem so I have no problem with their quality. They even have a couple of online retailers here in Australia supplying their stuff. I don't really want to buy any more external computer drives to be honest. Would rather spend the money on memory cards at this stage.

 

[evacguy]

I'm going on a 6 week road trip in the middle of Spring, in a couple of months. I'm going to be limited to about 1.5TB of computer storage to take with me. At the moment I have a 160GB CFexpress card & a 128GB SD card. As well as photos, I'm intending on taking quite a bit of video & hopefully, quite a few timelapse videos. How much storage do you think I will need? I have been looking at maybe getting one of these. Price seems pretty reasonable:

960GB OWC Atlas Pro High-Performance CFexpress 4.0 Type A Memory Card

Any help is much appreciated.

Wow, 6 weeks! Where are you going?

 

[Richard A]

I went to NYC in May for 5 nights and shot over half a terrabyte in that time was what I was basing it on (compressed A7R4 raw)

Thanks. That's exactly the sort of information I'm after.

We are going to Sydney, basically but taking about a week to get there (and about a week to get back also). I'm going to spread my mum's ashes, at a beach she really loved, on the way there. It'll be a bit risky because it's in a national marine park so it has to be well planned. We'll be using Sydney as a base to do some long day trips and maybe even some multi day trips off the normal tourist track. Such as - I have found some info on a glow worm cave.

 

[GT12]

If you’re taking your laptop then I find taking two 2TB external SSDs works well. One as a primary one to backup the RAW files and the Lightroom catalogue and videos from the MacBook (I import from memory card to Lightroom Classic separately to the stills). I use Carbon Copy Cloner to do this, and also for the copying of the primary external SSD to the secondary one. On a three week trip to Africa using a A7rV I clocked up 1TB of RAW files. I keep one external SSD in my pocket the whole trip and the other in my luggage. I format my SD cards when they fill up and I record to two SD cards at once.

 

[iamdlewis]

I don't know if you have Prime Days down under but if you do portable SSD drives from Samsung, Sandisk and WD are usually on sale.

 

[FowlersFreeTime]

I don't know if you have [Amazon] Prime Days down under but if you do portable SSD drives from Samsung, Sandisk and WD are usually on sale.

I'm looking for this deal next week as well.

 

[Richard A]

I don't know if you have Prime Days down under but if you do portable SSD drives from Samsung, Sandisk and WD are usually on sale.

We have some Prime Days coming up next week. I normally build my own portable SSDs. I certainly wouldn't buy a Sandisk one after the debacle they had with theirs recently. In fact, would probably never buy any Sandisk product again really.

Anyway, I'd probably rather spend the money on a few new memory cards as I think I am a bit short in that department. And another battery.

 

[iamdlewis]

Anyway, I'd probably rather spend the money on a few new memory cards as I think I am a bit short in that department. And another battery.

Another battery is generally a good idea. My issue with storing trip photos on SD/CF-A cards is that on a per MB cost it is vastly more expensive to do it that way and limiting.

I've done 3 big trips in which I have averaged ~1800 photos a day and on an A1 that is about 150GB a day so a 12 day trip is 11.25 160GB CF-A cards costing the equivalent of the GDP of the country I am probably going to. For less than the price of 2 CF-A card I can get 2 2TB SSD drives (plus a few meals and other things) which will allow me to backup all the photos I would take on the trip without using CF-A cards for photo storage.

Why I say SD/CF-A storage is limiting is because you don't want to end up in a situation late in the trip in which you are trying to figure out which cards have space left for your final day or two. I would never want to go into a day of shooting with space for 2000 images divided among 6 CF-A cards as there are too many bad things that can happen in such a scenario.

I don't like the 1 or 2 big cards as that puts everything in 1 basket. Also if there is down time on the trip it is easier to do culling from external drives than it is from a card. Also it isn't a bad thing to have external drives available in general.

 

[Richard A]

Like I said in the original post, I will have 1.5 TB of storage to backup my cards. Also, I’m not going to the desert in the middle of nowhere, I’ll be in, or close by, a big city. So if I desperately need another card or an external SSD it won’t be hard to source one. But I really don’t want any more SSDs if I can help it. Anyway, I appreciate your input.