External Hard drive?

[Olaf]

I'm interested in purchasing one of these, with a firewire. My computer is fast filling up and need to get these files on another hard drive. Any recommendations?

Also, can you guys suggest a good brank of CD or DVD to save on which to save my pics? I keep hearing about corrupted disks after just a few years, and I'd like to purchase some good disks that I can depend on.

 

[robertchance]

I can't offer an opinion about the external hard drive to purchase as I don't have one. As for the CD/DVD's to purchase, look for a brand name and the word/words ARCHIVAL on the package. If you get that type of recording media, you should be good to go for 50 to 100 years according to research i have read in popular computer/photo magazines. Here's a link to one brand so you have an idea what i am talking about
http://www.letsgodigital.org/en/news/articles/story_5790.html

 

[Scottl]

You can buy just about any external hard drive these days for a fairly good price. Firewire is significantly more expensive than USB connection. Why the need for Firewire if you are just transferring images? I have a firewire card for burning video from a video camera so it doesn't lag and jump but for storing files, speed shouldn't matter. You can get a 160 GB USB for $69 to 89ish but same size firewire is about $130. I've also seen blackfriday ads for 250 GB USB hard drives for $39.

 

[handicap18]

Check buy.com they always have great deals on external hard drives. If you have a USB 2.0 then there really isn't a need for firewire especially if your transfering files. 2.0 USB is VERY fast.

Geeks.com is also another good site to get external hard drives. I just ordered an external hard drive case with USB 2.0 connection and a 9 in 1 card reader built in. Case was I think $29. I'll pick up an internal hard drive a little later. I'm thinking probably a 160gig for about $50. The hard drive just slides right into the case and you now have an external hard drive that you can also use as a card reader either with your computer or take it with you on the road and download your photos right from your media. No need for a computer to download the picture files while on the road, its also battery operated.

There are also smaller portable external hard drives that have an MP3 player as well as the card reader. Those are only about 20gig though and go for about $120. Excellent concept though!

Eventually I'll also get just a dedicated external hard drive. You can never have too much disk space. Especially considering I've taken over 3500 pictures this year with my 6.0 MP digital camera. So far I've needed 2 DVD's to back them up. Not including the pic's from the Disney trip in June, I've taken almost 6gig worth of pictures and x-mas isn't even here yet (we'll have the family x-mas party as well as pics from x-mas day, that'll be another few hundred I'm sure)

 

[manning]

Seagate. It is the only brand that has a 5 year warrantee!!

 

[Olaf]

Thanks for the input.

I had heard that Firewire was the wag to go and since my computer has a 1394 port, I thought that would be the best. According to my last computer scan, I have over 21,000 JPEGs on my computer. Many of which, aren't backed up. Yes, I know, I have sinned.

 

[Miss Kelly]

I've also seen blackfriday ads for 250 GB USB hard drives for $39.

Hey Scott. Can you tell me where you've seen the 250gb hard drives for $39? Thanks.

 

[Scottl]

Hey Scott. Can you tell me where you've seen the 250gb hard drives for $39? Thanks.

At circiut city on Blackfriday. I think there are probably rebates involved.

http://blackfriday.gottadeal.com/black-friday-2062-IOMagic250GBExternal35HardDrive.html

 

[Miss Kelly]

At circiut city on Blackfriday. I think there are probably rebates involved.

http://blackfriday.gottadeal.com/black-friday-2062-IOMagic250GBExternal35HardDrive.html

Thanks! Unfortunately, I don't live near a Circuit City. Bummer.

 

[Groucho]

Like Manning says - with Seagate, you get a five-year warranty; with everyone else, a one-year.

USB2 is faster than firewire. Many external drive cases do have both, though, but no reason to bother with firewire if you have USB2.

I would definitely go with getting a basic external drive box and getting your own hard drive - if for no other reason than to get the Seagate warranty. You'll probably also save money.

Here are NewEgg's available drive enclosures that take standard 3.5" hard drives. The cheapest is a mere $20 including shipping.

Don't forget that a hard drive is NOT a reliable backup source. If planning on using it for that purpose, make sure that everything is backed up on two hard drives and that they're looked at regularly so that you'll notice when they go bad.

For DVDs, I usually use Fuji as the BJ's Wholesale often has a 50-pack for $10 (with coupon) and that is a very hard price to beat! I also use Ritek, which are quite good. I'm not sure if I'd bother with archival because chances are that you'll be re-burning everyone onto BluRay or HD-DVD discs in a few years anyway. For really critical stuff, burn it to two discs and keep one in a safe location (fire safe, etc) - it's unlikely that both DVDs will suffer damage, and even if they did, probably not in the same location, so between the two, you'd get everything back.

I also would guess that archivals can still go bad early, even if the percentage is less, and I'd hate the be the guy who entrusted them with critical info only to find that a faulty disc was used.

Also, make sure that whatever program you're using to burn with has Verify turned on. You want to make sure that the disc you just burnt is error-free right off the bat!

 

[captaincrash]

If you are concerned about the safety and security of your photo collection then a RAID array is the way to go. BUT to build or buy one is usually pricey... until now. Or so it seems to me? Western Digital has an "all in one" RAID in a box called the My Book Pro II for only $479 (AMAZON and Google) for 1TB divided by 2 for the RAID 1 setting yields 500GB of physically seperate and redundant mirrored storage. The case has detailed instructions for cracking and servicing to swap if needed without voiding the warrenty! I was just reading about this and marveling at what this delivers in security!!! Of course, a spilled cup of water or physical accident could trash both drives in one fell swoop too!

http://www.wdc.com/en/company/relea...elease={898C10DE-1F16-4EF6-A8BE-50950849A2CA}

I'm impressed with this. I have 45,000 images on a 250GB HD + other stuff and it's only 1/4 full. When I get up to 3/4 full I'm gonna NEED a RAID array to store all my precious data securely! If I upgrade from my 6MB DSLR to a 10MB next generation 30D (the 40D) then I'll double my storage needs in no time. With any luck the going rates will offer a 4TB RAID for under $300 then and I'll gladly buy it! Then my 75GB external will go to my kids' computer and the 250GB drive will become my "working" drive.

 

[KarenAylwood]

Not to hijack the thread, but I was looking into how to backup my pictures as well. I wanted to get both an external hard drive and some archival CDs/DVDs. This is probably a stupid question- but do you burn to CDs or DVDs when saving pictures? I have a "CD burner" on my computer- does this work for pictures too? I don't quite understand what I'm looking for... count me clueless

 

[Groucho]

That's not that great of a deal... NewEgg sells Western Digital 500g drives for $175, so figure $350 for two. Most motherboards now support RAID right off the bat. Combine the two and there's your 500 gigs of RAID1 storage - plus, you can keep everything on it, so you won't have to reinstall Windows if one of your drives dies.

If you want a 5-year warranty by going with Seagate, the 500g drive is a big jump in price over the 400g ($230 vs $160) - I'd go with the 400g, it's cheaper per meg.

The WD device might be handy if you absolutely need external storage or have a "big name" PC that doesn't support RAID on the motherboard, but if you have a PC that can handle it, it's a good bit cheaper to go internal. Still, I'm happy to see anything that will help cut down on lost data - of course, the temptation is great to just skip the RAID and double the storage!

Unfortunately drive prices don't seem to be going down like I'd expect... 160g drives have been $40 in "Sunday ads after-rebate" pricing for many months, now you're lucky to find them for $50. A year ago, I'd have thought that you'd often be able to find a 300g for $50 or so, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

 

[Groucho]

Not to hijack the thread, but I was looking into how to backup my pictures as well. I wanted to get both an external hard drive and some archival CDs/DVDs. This is probably a stupid question- but do you burn to CDs or DVDs when saving pictures? I have a "CD burner" on my computer- does this work for pictures too? I don't quite understand what I'm looking for... count me clueless

You can burn to either one. The disc itself doesn't care what the content is - it's just a blank slate that can take a certain amount of data. For CDs, it's 700 megs; for DVDs, about 4.5 gigs. Since DVDs hold approximately seven times the data and only cost about twice as much (sometimes less), they are obviously much more economical if you're burning a lot of stuff.

Your burner will have a couple logos on the front. Probably one will be "Compact Disc ReWritable", another might be "DVD-ROM", and possibly "RW DVD+ReWritable" or similar. If it's just a CD burner, then you won't have the last one and will only be able to burn CDs. DVD burners are very inexpective (as cheap as $30) but if you don't have a lot to back up, you may wish to stick to CDs for the moment.

Buy yourself a spindle of blank discs (it's far, far cheaper to buy them in a spindle - 25, 50, or 100-pack, than to buy them in a 10-pack). To actually burn the discs, your PC (or burner, if you bought the burner separately) should have come with CD burning software. This is usually Nero or Roxio Easy CD Creator, or possibly Sonic RecordNow. Any of them will work. All are fairly easy to use. Like I mentioned earlier, check to see about an option for verifying after burning, to ensure that the disc burnt error-free. Nero has a checkbox that's available during the burn, the other two set it in the options beforehand.

If you don't have any of that software, you CAN use Windows XP's built-in CD burning functionality (assuming you have XP) but I don't care for doing it that way.

You can download a trial version of Nero at www.nero.com and probably can get trials of the others (Roxio and Sonic merged so you just have to go to www.roxio.com now), they are usually full-featured for 30 days. I'm a big fan of Nero myself.

Of course, you need to know where on your hard drive the pictures exist - that depends on how you're getting the pictures off the camera (some programs put them different places.)

Hopefully this is some help.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

For burning software, I like Archive Creator. It's ridiculously overpriced at something like $50 or $60, but it does a great job. It builds an index on each disk with thumbnails. It spans multiple disks in a single session (with the complete index for the collection on all disks). It's got a lot of nice features. If you're relatively price insensitive, it's a great product.

As for RAID, I love having a NAS (Network Attached Storage). It's like a little file server that sits on your network. The consumer and small office versions typically hold 4 disks in a RAID 5 array giving you 75% of the capacity of the disks with redundancy. So if you load one up with four 400 gig drives, you'll get 1,200 gigs of storage with an extra drive for redundancy. I'm partial to the Infrant brand, but there are other comparables ones out there as well. A basic Infrant box is $600 without disks, so the whole solution will cost you a bit over a grand. You can build your own for a bit less, but not if you factor in much for parts acquisition, build time, and maintenance hassles.

The nice thing about a NAS is that every computer on your network can see it. We use ours to hold photos, home videos, movies, music, and backups. Every machine in the house backs up to the NAS and they all read from it for displaying photos, watching movies, etc.

You can even configure most NAS units to e-mail when they have trouble. I had a disk start to report errors the other day and got an e-mail from the NAS. I powered it down, swapped out the disk, powered it on, and was back in business without losing any data.

 

[AZ JazzyJ]

You can also create your own external hard drive. Tiger Direct has a 320 GB SATA hard drive for $109 and an external drive enclosure for $17 so you could build your own external drive for $126. I've done a few of these. All you need is a screwdriver and a anti-static strap for your wrist to ground yourself from static electricity. The speed of Firewire and USB 2.0 are very close and many of the enclosures you can buy have both kinds of ports on the back so you can use the drive on whichever you have available. I would suggest an external drive versus an internal RAID. A RAID array usually runs a little hotter and to really get full protection you need to run in a RAID 5 configuration something most of the built in controllers don't do. With RAID you also lose full capacity since 1 drive is dedicated to hot spare. With an external drive you can duplicate what you want, burn it to DVD/CD or you can copy it to another external drive. It's a little more versitile. Plus in case of emergency it is easy to grab an external drive to take with you rather than a desktop computer with a RAID array.

Jeff

 

[MarkBarbieri]

I have one concern about external hard drive enclosures. Some of them don't handle huge writes very well. If you peruse the reviews on Amazon, you'll see several reports of delayed write errors on the Seagates. I had that problem with mine when I tried to dump 200 gig on it. When I broke it up into 10 gig chunks with some cooling time between, everything was OK. It might have something to do with heat dissipation, but I'm not sure why a hard drive would get significantly warmer while writing than idling.

 

[AZ JazzyJ]

During idle the write heads are typically stationary while on a read or write they are continuously moving. The number and density of platters will also make a difference as will the drive speed (5400 RPM vs 7200 RPM vs 10000 RPM). Typically the faster the spin the hotter the motor runs. Drive enclosures can be found with and without heat dispersement (either through heat sinks or via fan). I would recommend opting for one with a fan to allow for cooling. I would also look for a drive that used elevator seeking or perpendicular recording as they are more efficient especially during extended writes.

Jeff