Just bought this to store my Photos on...

[wkrider]

http://www.wdc.com/global/images/products/frnt/wdfMyBook_Essential_1U.jpg

Link to WD site (http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=218&language=en)

Does anyone else use and External Hard Drive to store your media?:surfweb:

[tinksdad]

Yep, I've got two internal 300GB hard drives and one 200GB external. You can NEVER have enough storage or memory!! :cool1: :banana:

[Groucho]

Just make sure that it's not the only place you're storing your photos... hard drives are not reliable and external hard drives are difficult to scan for errors.

I actually recently ripped a 160g drive out of an external box and stuck it (along with a couple others) into an old PC I built as a NAS box. But all my photos are burnt to two DVDs, one of which goes in my fire safe. I have thought about trying to store all the RAWs on the network somewhere, to make it easier if I want to tweak an older photo, but I haven't done anything like that yet. I'm always fighting running out of disk space, no matter how much storage I have... funny how that works!

[boBQuincy]

Just make sure that it's not the only place you're storing your photos... hard drives are not reliable and external hard drives are difficult to scan for errors.

Interestingly, Dell just announced they are offering solid state drives (which are nothing more than big memory cards) for some of their laptops. The benefits are greater reliability, faster access, and less power consumption.
The drives are 32GB and $$$ but in time the price will come down and the size will go up.
Just think, eventually we will be storing our memory card contents on ... memory cards! :)
And many people will *still* make only one copy, and they will *still* be amazed when it crashes and loses all their images. :( Listen to Groucho, make multiple copies!!!

[jann1033]

op i got the same brand, not sure if it's the same gb but so far so good a couple months later...i've been storing my edited photos on it and keeping my current catalog of raw files on my main hard drive, mainly because it takes awhile for my computer to pull stuff up from the external drive and i have no patience when i want to edit something;)

[wkrider]

Just make sure that it's not the only place you're storing your photos... hard drives are not reliable and external hard drives are difficult to scan for errors.

I actually recently ripped a 160g drive out of an external box and stuck it (along with a couple others) into an old PC I built as a NAS box. But all my photos are burnt to two DVDs, one of which goes in my fire safe. I have thought about trying to store all the RAWs on the network somewhere, to make it easier if I want to tweak an older photo, but I haven't done anything like that yet. I'm always fighting running out of disk space, no matter how much storage I have... funny how that works!

will do.....I am going to back up ALL my photos to disk (which I have done for some time) and put them in our fire safe....I just wanted to free up space on my PC for the non-photography stuff.

[photo_chick]

All my drives for my PC's are internal, I have an older WD external on my iMac. I have had pretty good luck with the Western Digital drives I have, though most have failed on me after a few years of heavy use, but then I am pretty abusive to my drives and run them nearly 24/7.

[MarkBarbieri]

I keep copies of my photos on two RAID 5 NAS boxes. To lose a photo, I'd have to lose more than one drive at a time on both NAS boxes. So far, I've never had more than one drive fail, so I haven't lost anything.

Just to be safe from fire, flood, etc, I also make DVD copies of my photos (using Archive Creator). I keep one copy at the house and the other at my office. In theory, the DVD's will eventually wear out, but I plan on copying all of them to HD-DVD, Blue-Ray disks, or whatever the next common format is.

[Groucho]

Solid state hard drives are certainly a step forward but I think their big advantage is speed. Reliability will certainly be better, but they'll be like any other memory, and probably will go bad sooner or later... but will probably last a lot longer than a spinning hard drive, with all its delicate moving parts.

But the notion of being able to store the swap file on a solid state drive is one that is very enticing! It's almost as good as having 30-some-gigs of memory in your PC...

As for discs, like Mark, I figure that as long as my burnt discs last until the next generation of disc storage technology, I'm all set... (note that disc = things like CDs, DVDs, etc, while disk = floppy or hard disk.)