Albert Dros

Background

Albert Dros is a photographer from the Netherlands, and is featured in international media such as National Geographic, TIME, HuffPost, and the Daily Mail. Known as a leading landscape photography professional, Albert maintains a high standard for capturing shots even when working in challenging natural environments.

Previous challenges

To get the best shots possible, Albert often takes 10,000+ photos per trip, and file sizes of high-resolution images sometimes reach up to 100 MB. Early in his career, he used to store files in external hard drives and a DAS, the Drobo 5N and 8D, however he often had organizational issues since the number of drives constantly increased.

Solution

Albert chose the 12-bay desktop NAS TVS-h1288X, the Intel® Xeon® W desktop QuTS hero NAS, for his new storage solution. This model is ideal for high-speed media collaboration over Thunderbolt™ 3 and 10 GbE (built-in).

He chose Western Digital Red series drives that specially designed for NAS use:
• 8x WD Red Plus 10TB
• 4x WD Red SA500 1TB SSD
• 2x WD Red SN700 NVMe 1TB SSD

Result

After centralizing all his photos, Albert found out the many other benefits of QNAP NAS for professional photographers besides its large storage capacity.

Data safety: Albert loves the NAS application Hybrid Backup Sync that easily mirror-syncs his files to a remote NAS for ensuring his data safety. Hybrid Backup Sync supports most major cloud services and FTP. He works on different projects every day, and constant data sync and mirroring makes sure his backups are always up to date.

Connectivity: Albert has two workstations, a Mac Studio and MacBook. At his home he accesses the NAS with a 10 GbE Mac Studio via the networking switch QSW-2104-2T. Albert also uses the Thunderbolt 3 ports on the TVS-h1288X that allows him to directly access NAS folders with a MacBook that travels with him while shooting.