External HDD

BBones

OK, I need an external storage solution bad. Any recommendations? I run off of a laptop so an internal HDD is out of the question, it needs to be USB

pathfinder

BBones wrote:

OK, I need an external storage solution bad. Any recommendations? I run off of a laptop so an internal HDD is out of the question, it needs to be USB

I hope your laptop has USB 2.0 Otherwise external HD storage will be slow to access.

I have a 60Gb external Firewire drive for my laptop made by Firelite. It will work with a Mac or Windows with a powered 6 pin Firewire port It does not require any external power with the 6 pin Firewire cable. I bought mine at the Apple store, but you can probably find it in the PCConnection catalog.

BBones

Yeah it has USB 2.0. You think a 60 GB is enough? I am seeing Maxtor 200 GB's for around $170

pathfinder wrote:

I hope your laptop has USB 2.0 Otherwise external HD storage will be slow to access.

I have a 60Gb external Firewire drive for my laptop made by Firelite. It will work with a Mac or Windows with a powered 6 pin Firewire port It does not require any external power with the 6 pin Firewire cable. I bought mine at the Apple store, but you can probably find it in the PCConnection catalog.

David_S85

60 used to be a large drive. Not even the base models come with anything less than about 120 anymore. A couple more years, and the card in your camera will probably be a 60GB. If I were doing it, I'd buy the largest drive I could reasonably afford.

The old quote "less is more" doesn't ever apply to computing. "More" will always become "less" in short order.

BBones

True, I am just looking now to find out if anyone has had really bad or really good experiences with any particular models. All it is going to do is just hold onto pictures that are waiting to be edited.

pathfinder

David_S85 wrote:

60 used to be a large drive. Not even the base models come with anything less than about 120 anymore. A couple more years, and the card in your camera will probably be a 60GB. If I were doing it, I'd buy the largest drive I could reasonably afford.

The old quote "less is more" doesn't ever apply to computing. "More" will always become "less" in short order.

David - I may be misinformed - but most of the large >100 Gb drives requre an external power supply - my 60Gb drive is powered by the Firewire port in my Powerbook, so there is no extra brick to carry around.
I do have a 500Gb LaCie drive to b/u my desktop, but it is much larger and requires external power.

The 60Gb drive I mentioned is about the size of a deck of cards. Convenient for travel - I plan to use it for storage of my RAW files at the end of the shooting day in lieu of burning DVDs. 60Gb is a lot of RAW files and a huge amount of jpgs for temporary storage until I return home. The 60Gb is what I am taking to Yosemite with me for two weeks shooting on the road.

Most laptops do not have 120GB drives yet do they? My PowerBook is maxed out at 100Gb. But backing up the operating system does not require anywhere near that large a drive - It can be done in about 20Gb or so, like on an iPOD.:):

mercphoto

pathfinder wrote:

David - I may be misinformed - but most of the large >100 Gb drives requre an external power supply

If the drive is a notebook drive then it can be bus powered off a 6-pin Firewire connection, no matter how many G's it has. This is a big, big plus to 6-pin Firewire. I have a 100G drive in an enclosure. I can replace the drive in the enclosure when it comes time to archive that disk.

I really, really like not having a brick with my external hard drive. It is so much nicer to use. I don't know if you can do the same with USB 2.0. In my opinion, FireWire is where it is at. Faster than USB 2.0, powered options. Too bad the PC world doesn't agree. Glad Apple sees the light.

Andy

i use 250gb external maxtor drive (7200rpm) - works on pc or mac. cheap! way less than $1 per gig. usb or firewire. have used now for nearly three years, and just bought another one...

cheers

andy

wxwax

I have two Maxtor externals, USB2, separate power supply. No problems. If you're not running WindowsXP, you'll need to download software from Maxtor to support larger drives, I think over 120GB. Do a search of dgrin for Maxtor, you'll find the thread in question.

I'm with David, buy the largest you can afford. And don't forget to back your stuff up. Unlike me. :uhoh

photobug

I picked up a 160gb Seagate 7200rpm EIDEUltra/ATA drive and a USB2.0 enclosure (with flash-card reader built-in) for about $100 at Frys**. If I recall, the enclosure does have its own power supply but it's just a wall-wart, not a big "brick".

I hooked it up to the PC with a USB cable, XP recognized it, I did a quick disk format, and I've been happily copying files to it for backup purposes ever since (a couple of months).



...As a side note: darn, thanks to upgrading to a dSLR a year and a half ago, those photo files are really multiplying! We just got back from a one-week vacation (Alaska) to discover that I had shot about 7GB of photos (RAW+JPG). Yikes! I'm deleting the RAW files for all but the "keeper" shots, which will help somewhat -- that will probably cut the storage space in half. Still, disks fill rapidly at that rate...



** Frys = a huge electronics retailer in Silicon Valley; for those elsewhere, its web presence is http://www.outpost.com. Its regular prices are OK; its sale prices can be incredible

wxwax

photobug wrote:

Still, disks fill rapidly at that rate...

Time to burn some DVD's, 'bug.