External Hard Drives

[mousehockey37]

I know the title is a little misleading I'll explain:

As I've gotten more addicted to photography (Disney and beyond), I find myself starting to run out of room on my laptop. I also do other hobbies (music editing) on my laptop as well, so I have lots of music stored along with my pictures.

So...

What suggestions are there for an external hard drive? I'm new to the running out of room on my computer stuff, so less techy more English would be great! LOL.

 

[boBQuincy]

Google gathered data on their hard drives and found almost no difference in reliability between brands. Google found that after two years of use the drives started to fail but two years of their use may be a lifetime of our typical use. Since most external drives are simply hard drives in a case they are likely to have about the same reliability as the ones in our computers. *In time they all will fail!*

The key here is redundancy, the more the better. We should never have our photos on only one drive! Two drives greatly increases our reliability. A third drive that is usually kept offsite adds even more reliability. This is not far-fetched, a number of people on this board use this strategy.

Within external drives there are two main types that I am aware of: the larger ones with a power supply are 3.5" drives; the smaller ones that get power from the USB cable are 2.5" laptop drives that may not generally be as reliable as the larger ones. My suggestion is at least two separate hard drives.

 

[xlxo]

I'm a big fan of Drobo redundacy, but it's getting heavy hauling that thing each time my laptop is full.

I'm now using WD passports. I like the 2tb version for archive purposes. http://www.amazon.com/Passport-Portable-External-Storage-WDBY8L0020BBK-NESN/dp/B005HMKKH4

When away from home and want something play all my vid's on my phone and tablet.... I shoved a 1tb SSD into my Guanlet node. Battery powered wifi connects to my devices.