Computer and Data Storage Advice

[Hagar8907]

Hello All,

Thank you in advance for your insights! I am a retired pilot/engineer new to drones. Recently, I purchased a Matrice 4T to start a small company which will primarily perform inspections and mapping services. For running DJI Terra, DJI recommends a computer with Windows 10 or higher, 32GB memory, an NVIDIA graphics card with 4GB graphic memory. These are likely minimum requirements so I would love to hear your recommendations on if it is worth the money to add more memory etc to the computer.

My current employer issued me a Dell 7680 workstation so I'm leaning towards getting one for my business since it will seamlessly work with my current desktop setup. Also, if I need to travel for a job and spend the night at a hotel, I could knock out some data processing in the hotel if I have a laptop like the Dell 7680. One concern I have is data storage. How much storage space do I need? Is it better/more economical to buy external drives for the bulk of my data storage?

Thanks,
Hagar8907

 

[jaja6009]

I do the following.

I like to process on a powerful desktop with SSD drives.
All processing takes place on the fastset SSD drive (M2).
All current projects already processed are then stored on the desktop on a SATA SSD drive. This is in case I still need to process something or use in other software.
Once projects are completed they are archived on a USB SSD drive.
Images are treated the same as above, with archived images going onto USB SSD drives.

I try to keep all active projects and images on the fastest SSD drives, then move them to USB SSD drives to be archived.

My workflow will suffer in your scenario with laptop processing unless I do a remote connection with my desktop, which is possible. But this is extremely large amounts of data.

 

[Hagar8907]

I do the following.

I like to process on a powerful desktop with SSD drives.
All processing takes place on the fastset SSD drive (M2).
All current projects already processed are then stored on the desktop on a SATA SSD drive. This is in case I still need to process something or use in other software.
Once projects are completed they are archived on a USB SSD drive.
Images are treated the same as above, with archived images going onto USB SSD drives.

I try to keep all active projects and images on the fastest SSD drives, then move them to USB SSD drives to be archived.

My workflow will suffer in your scenario with laptop processing unless I do a remote connection with my desktop, which is possible. But this is extremely large amounts of data.

Thank you! That is very helpful information that I will take to heart.

 

[Hagar8907]

Thank you! That is very helpful information that I will take to heart.

jaja6009,
Follow up question if you have the time. With such large files, how do you typically get them to your clients?

Thanks,
Hagar8907

 

[jaja6009]

jaja6009,
Follow up question if you have the time. With such large files, how do you typically get them to your clients?

Thanks,
Hagar8907

Usually cloud based or printed.

I use Agisoft mostly and they have a cloud sharing platform that is pretty cheap. It allows measurements, an inspection mode, annotations and reports. It is not as nice as Drone Deploy, but I am not a fan of drone deploy for my purposes as I like to control my processing and in timed tests, my beefy desktop will finish processing faster.

My beach erosion project is shared on ESRI Arc Online and ESRI is pretty reasonable for storage credits and very powerful in what you can do as far as making presentations and performing analysis.

For printing, Vistaprint is pretty reasonable, but be aware, they are not a map printing service and will not take a perfectly scaled ouput from something like ESRI and print it exactly as you plan (You have it set up sor 1 inch equals a set distance, and then it gets resized due to how they crop the image).

A lot of people want further processsing of the data. Drone point clouds are extremely large so decimating them to points spaced out to 5 to 10 meters is easier to work with and still makes a good DEM or TIN file. Also a lower resolution DEM or grid of points makes a much better set of contours since super high resolution DEMs will make contours with way too many contour lines for each elevation (Contours for small areas). I use ESRI Arc Pro for this, but Virtual Surveyor is a good option for making point grids and TINs also.

To share the large drone outputs, I can also just place them in a Google Drive folder. More advanced clients can also install Agi Viewer and work with the drone data. With this you get the pure data, that looks much nicer, but has a learning curve with the software.