external harddrives

Dutchie · 11-07-2008, 13:22

Really can't find it anymore. But I'm sure there was a threat about external harddrives.

I need one. Can anyone advice for good deals please.

**stepheno** · 11-07-2008, 13:29

I use Aria or most hardware. I can recommend them, and they do Collect at Store or Mail-order. They are in Manchester.

silkstone · 11-07-2008, 14:11

There are some good deals right now on the Seagate FreeAgent drives.

Maplin > 500GB Seagate FreeAgent™ Hard Drive

Seagate FreeAgent Desktop 1000GB (7200rpm) 3.5" inch 8MB USB 2.0 Hard Drive (External) ST310005FDD1E1-RK - Saverstore.com

Dutchie · 11-07-2008, 14:44

Wow a few years ago the price was the same but then for 60gig

Thanks for your links.

silkstone · 11-07-2008, 15:00

Pleasure! I have the 500GB one and it's been fine so far. There is no on/off switch - the idea is that you leave it plugged in and hooked up, and it will go to sleep after about 15 minutes' inactivity. There is software included which lets you configure an automatic backup of the folders you choose, and that seems to work very well.

Whipspeed · 11-07-2008, 15:24

I've got two freecom drives, a 250gb and a 500gb, just leave them plugged in and drag files across to back up.
Just had computer sorted by hubby as hard drive was on the way out. We've now got a 250gb drive to keep documents on and a 750gb drive for my photo's.

Dutchie · 11-07-2008, 19:58

I might even go for the 1tb as the price difference is not very much. Hubby was talking about network drives as well. Anyone experience with that?

silkstone · 11-07-2008, 20:11

Network drives should be OK if all your machines use the same OS and filesystem - e.g. Windows and NTFS. Not sure about mixing Vista and XP because I heard somewhere that the way Vista's writes to NTFS isn't quite the same as XP, but that may be wrong. However, network drives are usually dearer, and you can share a normal USB drive over a network as long as the local machine is switched on.

Chris H · 11-07-2008, 20:30

Networked drives are differant to local drives.

A networked drive has to have it's own operating system, I would imagine it's a form of embedded NT or similar.

Formatting a drive with NTFS using XP will allow it to be written to and read by both XP and Vista.

I'm pretty sure Network or IP drives format themselves.

As for externals, I run 2 x Seagate freeagent 250gb drives off a USB Hub at the other side of the room. I got a very high quality 5 metre USB A-B cable and ran it under the carpet in the gap in between floorboards.

I have downloaded Microslurps Synctoy a program pointed out to me by Silky.

Now a merely sync the two drives at regular intervals.

Why 2 drives, well I had an external drive go bang last August and it killed the drive. Luckily my best mate got an identical drive at the same time so I borrowed the circuit board off his drive and it allowed me to recover over 2000 picky's.

Pheeuww

Dutchie · 11-07-2008, 20:31

Ah that's a good one. As we do have 2 pc's, but one has xp and the other vista.
I think it is going to be the external harddrive. It's good enough to me.

My husband wanted a server. But he can change the xp pc into a server. He's done it before. He made me a list and put server down at the bottem. As if

ChrisRabior · 12-07-2008, 00:23

I have like four external drives, and finally hit a point where it's cheaper and easier for me to spend the money on an online collection (signed up with smugmug). I'm giving their top level a try so I can sell my images.

If you're like me (I shoot at LEAST once a week on average, and frequently that once is a pretty image intensive outing), then I'd say forget about the external drives and just look for an online storage. If you're averaging a gig of pictures a month that you want to keep, then go for a nice 500GB drive and a good DVD backup system.

I'll be honest with you. External drives scare me. You NEED to have a dual copy of everything. An original set, and a backup.. so should one fail, you're not out of luck. DVD's and CDs don't have an incredibly long shelf life, and hard drives eventually fail. Good online storage options have multiple copies of your work stored in multiple locations, so even if 2 or 3 entire locations fail, they have you covered. I'll leave the storage responsibilities up to them.

silkstone · 12-07-2008, 01:28

Chris - You have a good point but the problem is that those of us on standard broadband connections are limited to 256kbps upload speed (even though download is 2Mbps), and that is painful with photo files.

I don't trust optical media but I'm willing to take the risk that two or three hard drives won't fail at the same time, so I'll store data on a separate internal drive and backup daily to an external drive. (That's on Windows - slightly different on Ubuntu where I end up with two backups, but that's another story.

)