Hard drives are what keep digital images readily available, as opposed to removable drives which have to be loaded and unloaded (presuming you can find the right disk in the several piles littering your studio).

The ideal way to handle large projects is to have a separate hard drive to hold all the pertinent images. This is especially helpful if you are working with thousand of images or images from a large format digital camera .

If you need image database management software, that is an additional solution, but it is considerably easier to have each major on-going project all together on a large hard drive (they come in 36 GB sizes and above these days). An even better solution is a RAID system (Level 0 is the fastest).

A single FLAAR photography project in Guatemala generated about 200 GB of data. That is a lot of removable disks, so we simply bought a stack of Seagate Cheetah Ultra2 LVD hard drives to handle this mass of material.