opinions on external storage

[jann1033]

i am considering an external hard drive for my mega picture storage but recently saw a panasonic dvd , video player and writer with 160 gb of storage as well it was at uncle walllymart for a little under 300

iknow i can get an external hard drive for much less but thinking it would be nice to be able to store my pics near the tv for viewing( and one less thing in my little office)
so anyone know anything about this type of machine.? i have no knowledge of such things, didn't even know they existed

 

[Groucho]

If you want to be able to view them on TV, then a DVD full of JPGs played in an under-$50 DVD player that plays JPGs (which is pretty much all of them nowadays) is probably the easiest solution. You can easily fit thousand of photos on one. Navigating can be a little bit of a pain depending on the player, but the Panasonic might be just as bad. Are you sure that the 160g can be used for picture storage, anyway? I think most devices like that use the hard drive only for time-shifting and TV program storage, Tivo-style.

In fact, a Tivo might be a better option all-around. They have a "home media" setup that lets your Tivo view your pictures (and play your music) across your home network, and it will almost certainly have a much nicer interface than the DVD player will. (I love my Tivo, but it's hacked pretty far so I can't use the Home Media with it so I'm not sure how that interface is.) You can then keep your pictures on your PC.

And as always, just make sure that you have backups, and aren't keeping an external HD as the only place you're storing your photos. A laptop I sometimes use just yesterday had its second hard drive failure in less than three years...

 

[Anewman]

There are many Laptop deals for around $500.

A couple months back My Mom picked up a Compaq with 80gb hard drive and DVD burner for $499 b4 a $50 rebate that dropped the total to $450.

 

[FedJeff]

I use a portable Hard Drive from Kanguru which goes from 80 Gig upto a 500 Gig capasity. PM me if you want the link.

As far as displaying them yeah i would go with the dvd or laptop heck you can get a decent laptop for the same price as a portable DVD burner. My lap top can hook up to my plasma so its easy to show off the photos. Also while i was at Sams Club Wharehouse i saw a digital picture frame that you could put .jpgs on and it was only like $100

 

[jann1033]

If you want to be able to view them on TV, then a DVD full of JPGs played in an under-$50 DVD player that plays JPGs (which is pretty much all of them nowadays) is probably the easiest solution. You can easily fit thousand of photos on one. Navigating can be a little bit of a pain depending on the player, but the Panasonic might be just as bad. Are you sure that the 160g can be used for picture storage, anyway? I think most devices like that use the hard drive only for time-shifting and TV program storage, Tivo-style.

In fact, a Tivo might be a better option all-around. They have a "home media" setup that lets your Tivo view your pictures (and play your music) across your home network, and it will almost certainly have a much nicer interface than the DVD player will. (I love my Tivo, but it's hacked pretty far so I can't use the Home Media with it so I'm not sure how that interface is.) You can then keep your pictures on your PC.

And as always, just make sure that you have backups, and aren't keeping an external HD as the only place you're storing your photos. A laptop I sometimes use just yesterday had its second hard drive failure in less than three years...

according to the sales man it can store pics, music what ever you want,,,plus it has a camera jack in front so guessing he is probably right at least about the picture part. although this was walmart so not really sure if he just sounded like he knew so guess i check that out for sure

...i really could use some additional storage( keep forgetting to ask bil as i thought he put a second hard drive on our PC but can't seem to find it) and figured I'd rather have it external( which i can get for about $100 or less) since it's basically for photos and music. i burn my pics on dvds already but like the option of just having them downloaded someplace already..guess it doesn't really make all that much difference cause i should really label the dvds as to what is specifically on them but haven't done that yet, just the 1 of 3 or what ever the photoshop says.

we have a direct TV recordable type set up with our satellite but it doesn't play DVDs or anything & our DVD player was a freebie from earth link but works but we are just thinking of condensing some junk into one for less wires.
i've considered a laptop but really don't need anything but the storage.

 

[Groucho]

If you've got DirecTV's DVR, that's a Tivo. I'm not sure if they offer the Home Media with it (like I said, mine's pretty hacked up), but you don't want to move the time-shifting and recording to a different device - you'll lose a bit of quality and convenience.

Today, Woot has as their daily sale, a DVD recorder with Divx playback (in other words, it'll play most .AVI files burnt into a disc) for $90. It's remanufactured but gives you an idea of what's out there. You can pick up DVD recorders for awful cheap nowadays - I can't see spending 3x as much for one with a hard drive inside. I'd lean towards pocketing the extra $200 and spending a night burning your favorite pictures onto a DVD or two. Viewing them on a hard drive won't be any easier than DVD if they are uncategorized.

That also gets into the whole concept of the best way to organize and tag photos, which I'm still trying to decide on. That's a topic for another thread, though.

 

[handicap18]

You can buy a hard case that will accept a 2 1/2" or 3 1/2" hard drive, has a USB 2.0 connection and also has a card reader built into it. The cases go for about $30, then you can add any size hard drive you wish depending on the price you want to pay. With the 3 1/2" drives you can get upwards of 200 GIG for between $50 and $75. The 2 1/2" drives are about $50 for 30 or so gig.

This makes the external hard drive portable and you can down load your pictures directly to the drive while your out on the road, thus needing less media cards. There are also some newer TV's that have a USB slot built into them. Not a lot right now, but with a lot of video camera's having USB cables you will see more and more newer TV's with the USB connection.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

If you've got DirecTV's DVR, that's a Tivo.

Not anymore. DirecTV has their own DVRs that are not Tivos.

I prefer to use a RAID NAS for storage. A NAS is little box that holds several hard disks and attaches directly to your network. NAS stands for Network Attached Storage. The RAID part stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. It uses several disks and is set up so that if one fails, the other disks have enough information to recreate what was on the bad disk. If you replace the bad disk with a new one before another disk fails, you don't lose any data. They are a bit pricey (about $600+ without the disk drives) for use just as extra photo storage, but they can be useful for many things. We store photos, music, backups, downloads, scans, and videos on ours.

 

[Groucho]

That's true, the very recent ones are their own design - but they were originally branded at Tivos and for quite a while, they were still Tivos, but only branded with DirecTV's logo - but still Tivo underneath. Mine is an older one set to not update the software, so it still has all the Tivo on-screen logos.

NAS is OK but I have so many PCs around that it's easier just to use their drives rather than attach something else to the network. I have always been too cheap to use RAID (and if I did cough up the extra money, I'd probably set it for performance rather than redundancy) but it's a great way to go if you can swallow the initial cost. My only concern is how the NAS will tell you if one of the hard drives is starting to fail (or has failed completely.) I haven't researched them, so I assume that there's SOME way. I primarily use my home theater PC (used for high-def content on the projector) for storage purposes - I have a good portion of my MP3 collection on there - probably 40 gigs or so. (I don't want to think about how much space the Disney park music is taking up!) They're all on CD as well, but it's convenient having them on the network so that any of the (many) PCs can access it to play music.

That being said... my sister just bought a house and in the basement were three servers, with redundant hot-swap power supplies and each with 5-drive SCSI raid cages. Unfortunately most of the drives are only 9g, with a couple 18g... but that still might be good for day-to-day backups.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

My only concern is how the NAS will tell you if one of the hard drives is starting to fail (or has failed completely.)

E-mail. Mine sends me e-mails when I'm running low on space. It also sends me e-mail when the UPS kicks in. Our power here is terrible, so I get a pair of e-mails about once a week saying that the power is out and now it is back on again. I can also get alerts sent if the temperature of any of the drives gets too high, the drives start to act wonky, or any other system health issues occur.

It was really easy to build. I just put the drives in the little trays that came with it, popped them in, plugged in power and network and turned it on. There was a trivial amount of software setup and I was good to go. I love it. It's a bit more expensive than grabbing an old computer, a cheap raid card, and a copy of linux to tie it all together, but it's so much easier that the extra cost was worth it to me. The box itself sells for about $600 without drives.

I'm a big storage user. I've got over 3 terrabytes of online server storage at home and just ordered another terrabyte because it's filling up.

 

[manning]

You may find this article interesting

http://www.pcphotomag.com/content/2006/nov/external_storage.shtml

 

[Groucho]

I couldn't afford online storage for all my stuff. I buy blank DVDs like crazy and I have probably six or seven of those 250-disc giant CD wallets and enough loose burnt discs to fill at least one or two more. Sometimes I think I spend more time trying to organize all my crap than I do actually enjoying any of it! Thank goodness for disc indexing programs.

But if you have the bucks, that's definitely the way to go. I'd love to keep everything online. And sending emails is great - I thought that might be the way.

Sort of on the original topic, probably one of the really good ways to get your stuff on TV would be a modified X-Box, I think the Xbox Media Center (? maybe Media Player) can play stuff (pictures/music/videos) off the network or off discs onto your TV. I tend to avoid MS stuff if I can so I'm not sure, but if I found a used one really cheap, I might try that. I don't think a stock one can do it, you'd need to have one with a mod chip inside.

 

[Anewman]

Sort of on the original topic, probably one of the really good ways to get your stuff on TV would be a modified X-Box, I think the Xbox Media Center (? maybe Media Player) can play stuff (pictures/music/videos) off the network or off discs onto your TV. I tend to avoid MS stuff if I can so I'm not sure, but if I found a used one really cheap, I might try that. I don't think a stock one can do it, you'd need to have one with a mod chip inside.

No Chip needed, soft mod does everything you stated without the need to open the XBOX. All you need is an "Action Replay" device and a copy of an exploitable game(splitner cell), but remember the stock hard drive in the xbox is only 8 gigs it requires much more knowledge(available online) to swap in a larger hard drive.

The only reason I would go with a laptop for one reason, RAW FILES. All of the other options listed will store them perfectly but that is it, with a laptop you can access/preview/convert them. And I did not think the price was too far off the option in the op.

 

[Groucho]

I wouldn't want to use RAW files for day-to-day viewing as they're so much slower to display than JPG - plus, just displaying the RAW files kind of defeats the purpose of the RAW file in the first place. (Kind of like looking at your film negatives instead of prints!) If you're concerned about compression artifacts, you can use PNG or even (shudder) TIFF, or another lossless format.

I wasn't sure on the whole X-Box mod thing. It's a chore to keep up with all that stuff, especially when you just want to do more or less legit things - I just picked up a Sony PSP for the wife to use as a nice photo display device, and had to get a used one to ensure that we'd be able to run homebrew and especially emulators for old game systems on it. (I love emulators!)

I did the swap trick for a while with the PS2 before finally doing a proper mod job - now I just use a hard drive and HDloader, works great. I recently had a chance to pick up a buddy's modded Xbox for $50 but someone else beat me to it... I'm really only interested in it for the media playing abilities, so I have a hard time justifying the cost normally. But anyway, can't that Xbox Media Player program play content off the network? If so, then there's be no need to put more storage into it, if it can connect to a shared folder full of JPGs on another machine on the network.

 

[Anewman]

I wouldn't want to use RAW files for day-to-day viewing as they're so much slower to display than JPG - plus, just displaying the RAW files kind of defeats the purpose of the RAW file in the first place. (Kind of like looking at your film negatives instead of prints!) If you're concerned about compression artifacts, you can use PNG or even (shudder) TIFF, or another lossless format.

Yes Raw files are not the best choice for viewing, just think it would be a plus that a back up storage device(laptop) could. Just makes it easier to go back and find the file you would like to print(or other), unless you take the time to label each and every folder and image.

In other words laptop is the only one that does both storage and viewing of raw files, even if it is not great at the view part. And you could still store all the other file types you mentioned. And it should fit i the room safes at WDW.

I wasn't sure on the whole X-Box mod thing. It's a chore to keep up with all that stuff, especially when you just want to do more or less legit things - I just picked up a Sony PSP for the wife to use as a nice photo display device, and had to get a used one to ensure that we'd be able to run homebrew and especially emulators for old game systems on it. (I love emulators!)

I did the swap trick for a while with the PS2 before finally doing a proper mod job - now I just use a hard drive and HDloader, works great. I recently had a chance to pick up a buddy's modded Xbox for $50 but someone else beat me to it... I'm really only interested in it for the media playing abilities, so I have a hard time justifying the cost normally. But anyway, can't that Xbox Media Player program play content off the network? If so, then there's be no need to put more storage into it, if it can connect to a shared folder full of JPGs on another machine on the network.

Yes my sons PSP with a 4gb stick is pretty loaded with emus(and CSOs), but we also do lots of video and music with it. He carries it more than his Ipod video.

Soft Modded xbox does not require a swap trick, once it is modded it boots up the dash(could install XBMC as default).
Yes you can play(stream) shared music and video off of pc on the network, but with a 200 gig hard drive it becomes an EXTERNAL STORAGE device. It plays everything(karaoke!) you can throw at it.

My local Gamestop sells Refubished xboxes for $90, add a 200gb hard drive from Frys @ $60 and for about the price of an external hard drive I get something that does so much more.

But one does not NEED to swap out the hard drive, .