 Deb Brown |
External Hard Drives Can someone offer any advice on buying an external hard drive? I use my laptop for all of my digital photographs. My current laptop is 1.4 GHz-40GB. And while I do back up files, I would still like to leave a lot of files on my hard drive for easy access. I do about 3 shoots a week right now. I am just looking for good quality, and any advice on appropriate/reasonable amount of space. Thanks in advance!
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robert G. Fately |
Deb, as a general rule, more capacity is better. It's really a matter of what you can afford to pay. As for brands, Fantom, LaCie, Maxtor and a number of other brands are quite reliable. The big issue is how they would connect to your laptop - do you have USB, USB 2, or Firewire (IEEE1344) connectability? Whichever, you need to get a drive that connects that way. One spec about hard drives is their spin speed - 5400RPM or 10,000 RPM, etc. For the purpose of storing image files, this will not matter much - you can save money by buying a "slower" drive. The uber-fast models are really made for videography types - who need very fast transfer rates to/from the main computer while editing or showing video. Drives keep coming down in price. I just replaced my 120GB drive with a 250GB (Fantom, both times), which, 1 year later, was cheaper than its 120GB predecessor. Check places like PCConnection.com, PCWarehouse.com and PCMall.com to get an idea of costs.
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Deb Brown |
Wow, Bob. What a wealth of information! Thanks so much for taking the time to respond, and for giving me a great starting place as I do my research. Happy New Year.
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Christopher A. Vedros |
If you have CompUSA or BestBuy in your area, look for their ads in the newspaper, they put external hard drives on sale just about every week.
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Aiden C |
Mine is not so much an answer but another related question.I'm in Australia and although Iwould classify myself as a beginner/amateur I am also looking for an external hard drive. My only problem is that I do not understand the terminology of SATA / IDE / SCSI. Can someone please explain this to me in non-technical terms. I have found the web to be just has confusing as sales staff on this question. Basically is a 250GB SATA drive perform better than a 250 GB SCSI drive? Also, I am aware you can make your own external hard drive's at a fraction of the cost, has anyone done this or attempted it? Finally another point to the discussion... Seagate make an external drive that can be stacked. Basically as you fill a hard drive and need more room you can buy another one and stack it on top of the previous one. Also, there are some external hard drives that are also portable (basically all external HD's are portable but the so called portable versions are smaller still. The catch --- the extra price tag for the smaller unit. Hope this helps. Thanks
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Aiden C |
Hi Mike Can you please explain to me how you went about making your own external drive? Are they easy to make? Regards
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anonymous A. |
A couple of issues: all external hard drives are not equally portable: the REALLY portable drives are battery powered and need neither a mains powerpoint nor a computer to operate, though they will connect to either when available. I travel with a 30gig drive which has SD, compact flash, MMC and other card readers built in which allows me to download direct to the drive on the road and clear my cards fotr further use. I have a 120Gig external drive plugged into the USB port of my laptop, but as Bob says, you can't get too large a drive. Cheap USB cases (about $80 Australian) are readily available. You just put any available drive (or other USB device, like a CD reader) into them and they plug into your USB ports. When I upgrade my computer, I just put the old drive into one of these and I have a slim, pochet-sized hard drive for transporting yet more files (I currently have a 6Gig and a 30Gig drive using these cases...very cheap, very handy). If you go down the USB route (as I think you should for ease of use, compatibiility and convenience), you don't need to worry about the terminology; in the external case, whether you bought them fitted out with a drive or put one in yourself, they all become USB drives.
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x |
Let me start by saying that I use ext drives like crazy, but be warned. I buy 2 for every one I need. It's a pain, but they fail all the time. Maxtor has a one year warranty, and I use it alot. They fail, you send it back, and they send you a replacement. Basically, the problem is that these cheap external unit burn up. They have no cooling element or fan. So, they just run until the heat burns them up. The only solution to this is a bit more expensive and techie. I think someone makes ext boxes that you can put the ext drives into that have cooling fans and all that. But, why go through all the trouble. I am looking into using hot swappable internal type HD's in a bay. You can see wht I mean here: http://www.cooldrives.com/qudrmifi80dr.html Anyway, ext drives are good. I use them, but they do fail, alot. So, be careful and back-up everything to either DVD or another HD.
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Aiden C |
Thanks David I think you have just convinced me to make my own. Do you see a need to include a fan within the unit? I am aware of one that model that has a fan within the unit for safety. To me this sounds like a good idea but maybe it's something I need to look into with an IT pro. I'm into adventure and backpacking so the smaller the better. Thanks
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Bill Wyatt |
I think another sound alternative is an external DVD writer. As we all know even the best hard drives whether internal or external eventually crash, I have found this out the hard way. So I purchased a HP external Dual Layered DVD burner. I also purchased a box of 100 single layered blank DVD’s, single layer DVD’s hold about 4.7 gig and dual layer twice that but at about twice the cost. The total cost was about $160.00 USD. It came with software that burns multi sessions so I download my pictures choose the keepers and burn them to DVD. Now I don’t have to worry about hard drive crashes stealing all my photos. The only draw back is you will need USB 2 but never fear if you have USB 1 because a PCIMA USB2 cards are very cheap and if you buy an external hard drive you will want one of those anyway.
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Aiden C |
Thanks for you help Mike and Andy. I have seen cases for sale on ebay so that's basically how I figured you could probably make one. I will try several local independant pc stores to get something more trustworthy. Thanks once again
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Joan Bellinger |
Deb, I have had great success with Maxtor and Liteon external drives with both my laptop and desktop. For online purchases, I would like to suggest newegg.com. Sometimes your local office supply stores, Office Max, Office Depot and such, will have sales that do not require rebates.
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anonymous A. |
Bill's suggestion makes sense: my wife has gone down this route and is happy with burning her collection to CD. Personally I find it too cumbersome for organising and retrieving pictures, even with software to keep track of what picture is on which CD. So though I DO backup to CD, my working files are on hard drives which I can carry with me easily.
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Pam Kliment |
so,let me get this straight-they might burn up or crash with all your pics stored on them??
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Joan Bellinger |
Unfortunately Pam, that is true. My experience has been that the first time you see there being problems, you should backup and move your information until you get a new external drive.
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Test Test |
Making your own External HDD is fine. and its not difficult at all. The externalHDD casing has nothing in it except a Power supply and an IDE to USB interface. Regards
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Craig m. Zacarelli |
id stay away from from WesternDigital... I had a western digital external HD and it Crashed on me after about 6 months.. so I bought a Maxtor..no probs with it yet.. and I hope not.. I got tons of stuff on it. Craig-
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Christopher A. Vedros |
Craig - don't let one bad drive convince you that a brand is bad. I've been building and upgrading my own PCs for nearly 20 years and I've been through dozens of hard drives. The overwhelming majority of them were just replaced because I outgrew them. Over the years, I've only had 3 drives physically fail on me. One was a Seagate, one was a Maxtor, and one was a Western Digital. Those are the 3 big dogs when it comes to hard drives. If I avoid those, I don't really have much else to choose from. Lately, I've been buying mostly Western Digital drives. Best Buy & Circuit City keep putting them on sale. There's an important rule to follow with external hard drives, no matter what brand you get. Most of the external cases don't have built-in fans. If you have a hard drive in a case with no fan, you should NOT keep it running 24/7. Do your backups, do a safe disconnect with the system tray icon (in WinXP), and shut the drive off. It will last longer. Chris
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John Douven |
Friends, I noticed a few comments about external HDD's. As a Amateur Photographer (very Amateur) and having had a lot of experience with external USB/FW drives, I would like to add a few comments. External HDD cases come in 3 sizes, 5.25, 3.5, 2.5 inch. The 2.5 cases have no fans, take a laptop drive, and if the drive you're inserting is less than 60/80GB it does not need an additional power source. This unit will take it power from the USB plug. However, sometimes the HDD make comes into account because some drives made by some manufacturers require more power (esp on start up). The USB Case unit usually has a second plug attached to the USB cable for more power. The larger USB (5.25 & 3.5) cases require an external power source. There has been issues regarding the reliability of some of these USB drives. I have found that if the HDD has not been formatted properly the drive will fail. The solution to this problem it the following procedure: 1) Find a computer that has no second IDE HDD. Now your new HDD is ready to use and should be very reliable. For Aiden, try MSY Computers the 2.5 inch USB Cases sell for about $9 - $11 (AUD). I buy them there. For the Larger cases (5.25 & 3.5) they sell for about $45 (AUD) but make sure the power pack that comes with the Case can deliver more than 2amps because some drives are heavy users. IDE (or PATA) drives are very cheap (also at MSY). Their web site is msy.com.au hope this helps
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