My wife takes a lot of photos with her digital camera. A lot! Currently we save them to a hard drive then save them to CD-Rs for storage. To find a pic, its a complete PITA.

During sleep I thought, get an external H/D. The pics would be easier to find and no pics would be lost due to file maintenance.

What do you guys or gals think?

If so what kind is the best?

 

Great Idea! I use mine for that too. I have about 18,000 full res family photos on there (also have these 18,000 photos on my family website gallery at 80x600 though).

I think most of the more popular external HDD's are going to be good performers. I have an IOgear 250GB that I bought cause it was on sale. It has been a solid - year and a half so far. I need another and was looking at the Western Digital My Book 500GB model. Looks good to me.

When I'm researching equipment, I normally go check out www.cnet.com to see what they've had to say about the item.

 

Great idea X2.

We try to get all our computer customers to get External Drives for important items.

If you want to go the premade package, Western Digital has some good $ to Gig ratio drives. We use alot of Lacie, and sometimes a Maxtor.

I build my own.
For about $20 you can get an external drive case, in either USB 2.0 or Firewire. Then all you need to do is get an IDE drive of your choice to stuff in it.

I put together one the other day for my buddy 400G Usb 2.0, for just under $100. Drive was on Sale (rebates) for $70.

Get yourself an enclouser and find/wait for those killer sales on drives.


I have 3, 1 for my music, 1 for pics/videos, and the third for Tivo downloads from my two Tivos.

 

check out what others told me in this thread

I built my own, I had a 60gb HD lying around and for 25 bucks got a case for it... works great... I am thinking about upgrading to a 7200rpm 100gb drive, but well see...

 

okay guys what do you think about this one... the price looks right.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...ATT=22-136-026

 

I use a Seagate USB 2 200 GB external I bought a few years back.
I use it for backups every Sunday (automated) and also for storing all of my apps on if I have to format.

The TV recording I use to record to it too, but now they go right to my old PATA (D) drive instead.

Externals are great, you will get a lot of use out of it for sure.

 

That looks like a good one, if you have it on your computer use the 1394 connection, much faster than USB 2.0, which is still fast.

 

one thing you might want to ask yourself is if you are ever going to want to be used as a portable hd. Me being an art student in the digital world and working in labs, its essential to have a lot of moveable space. One thing you MIGHT want to look into is a hd that doesn't have an external power supply. All this means is that the HD uses the power from the usb/firewire instead of needing its own and all you do is plug it into the computer and your ready to go. I now have two Lacie drives and love them both. I have a 120gb that I have had for 4 years of some hard use being transported almost every day for 3 of those years and it is still going strong. This passed year my buddy gave me a good deal on one of their portable drives that I couldn't pass up. I just found on their website that they sell reconditioned units. If you don't mind buying recon (with factory warranty) they have a 250gb portable drive for $89. Its just usb2 but if your primarily going to be using it for image storage, that is plenty fast. Good luck!

 

I like the external HD's just keep in mind they too are mechanical devices and WILL fail at some point.

Redundant backup's are your friend. Then test your recovery methods.

 

I got the WD 320 GIG My Book a few months ago. I got it for $170 on sale at Best Buy. It is fine as long as you don't try to transfer a large number of files to it at one time. Every time I try to either transfer a large amount of small files or a few really big files, the drive freezes up and the computer no longer can find iit. I can usually just unplug the usb plug and plug it back in and all will be well, but sometimes I have to totally reboot the computer.

 

Jonno,

I just ordered this one for net $69.97 including shipping. Had to get their credit card for the extra $30 off. I'll cancel in a month.


http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=10362387&adid

Edit: Security setting

 

Wow thats a deal!!

 

just make sure you back up to CD or DVD too, probably monthly. My maxtor external just bit the dust, I had backed up the drive a week earlier on DVD's, so while it was inconvenient, it wasn't a disaster.