Which External HD?

[tanagawizi]

<p>Just looking for some opinions, here's my criteria:</p>

<p>External HD just for Back up (for now) before I lose all my photos when this machine dies.<br>

I move around a bit, so something sturdy.<br>

I've been taking photos since about 2006 and currently have about 65GB worth of photos in my folders (if that gives an idea of the sort of size I'd need)</p>

<p>These things change all the time- new ones come out often as tech gets better etc, so what's the current 'Top Picks'? I have have done some research but wanted to ask here because you all will be familiar with the needs of photographers!</p>

<p>Many thanks for any input<br>

Barney<br>

PS I currently use a Mac but will probably have to switch to PC this year</p>

[Matt Laur]

<p>Are you looking for a desktop unit (that gets grid power from the wall, and hangs off of a USB port for data), or are you looking for a portable unit that gets its power via the USB port - as would be typically used in the field?</p>

[ShunCheung]

<p>There is currently another parallel thread on this same topic with plenty of answers already: <a href="http://www.photo.net/off-topic-forum/00VOEi">http://www.photo.net/off-topic-forum/00VOEi</a></p>

<p>In terms of volume, 65G is essentially nothing. Today, 500G, 1T external drives are quite affordable. The key is that all hard drives will eventually fail. If your image files are important to you, make sure you save multiple copies on at least two different drives, preferably with one copy stored off site.</p>

[robert_brake1]

<p>Barney, before you switch to a PC bear in mind that most Macs, for some time, can boot directly from a mirrored external drive if it is Firewire, (but not usb). I don't know about PC capabilities in that same vein. I have two 500mb Firewire 3.5" drives that keep duplicates of all my photos as well as a bootable mirror on one of the 3.5" drives and another bootable mirror on a small Firewire portable 2.5" drive that goes with me when i travel. If I should ever lose my internal HD, pressing Option while restarting will give me the capability to immediately use one of the mirror drives to get back up and keep working until the internal can be replaced.</p>

<p>Having lost a hardrive on an old PC some years ago that instant recovery is something I can appreciate.</p>

[peano]

<p>Get a good internal drive (e.g., Seagate, Western Digital) and an external enclosure (good one <a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=rosewill+external+enclosure+3.5&x=0&y=0">here</a> ).</p>

[myworkshop]

<p>The best bet is to get an "External Hard Drive Enclosure". They are available cheap for under $50. This allows you to use any internal HD as an external unit. Just put any HD into the enclosure and plug it in to any USB and your ready to go. If you get a new computer, just put the old computer's HD into the enclosure and plug it into the new computer and all your files are there. Again, you can do this with virtually any internal HD out there, increasing your choices and versatility tremendously.</p>

[homer_arment1]

<p>I have used Seagate's FreeAgent, Maxtor's Desktop USB2 drive and Western Digital's new USB2 drive (all for desktop and currently all in 1 TB size since that seems to be the 'sweet spot' pricing wise and all desktop models. I also use a 640 Gig Toshiba portable with my laptop when I travel. It seems to me (I haven't ran any empirical tests) that all of the dedicated USB2 models have a faster transfer rate than any of the several external drives that I have made using an enclosure and a stand alone drive. Of the drives I am using I like Seagate's FreeAgent best followed closely by the Toshiba portable model. </p>

<p>Not too long ago I remember seeing a review of several dedicated USB2 drives but I don't recall which had the best transfer rates. I think the article was in a PC World mag but I am not sure. For your peace of mind, most recent (last 2-3 years) windows PC machines can boot from a USB2 device so if you decide to 'mirror' your boot drive to a USB2 drive it could be used as a boot device. I would recommend that whatever you decide on that you use whatever size drive seems the best buy (gigs/$$$) because you will fill it up sooner than you thought possible when you bought it. The suggestion for getting a second external and keeping one off site is a very good one too. We all know that bad things happen to good people (bad people too but they wouldn't be on this forum).</p>

<p>Happy New Year to all.</p>

[peano]

<p>In my post above, I meant to link to <a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182153&cm_re=rosewill_external_enclosure_3.5-_-17-182-153-_-Product">this</a> enclosure.</p>

[walter_degroot]

<p>I spent about an hour looking at various external hard drives.<br>

I read the manual for one and it is subject to failure if it is bumped or dropped and should not be used as a portable drive.<br>

so then I looked at portable drives. I don't plan on walking around with a drive in my pocket.<br>

but accicents do happen and bump and drop resistance is a good thing.<br>

Then I started thinking, I am backing up a lot to cd-r disks. and yes I know that may fade in 2-5 years.<br>

but what about a dvd-r drive. the capacity is much larger and possibly more secure.<br>

but a small box of dvd's could be taken somewhere else for off-site storage.<br>

Possibly a smaller hard drive plus a dvd writer.</p>

[david_henderson]

<p>Its a difficult question to answer because most people who have had a drive long enough to recommend it will have capacities way below current "sweet spot " pricing. Both the Iomega 160 GB I've had for a few years and the Freecom 500GB I've had for maybe 2 years have been so far trouble free. The Freecom even looks quite nice. I can't think of any criteria other than reliability and appearance that would be significant to me.</p>

[sarah_fox]

<p>I'm using HP SimpleSave external USB drives. They come with backup software preinstalled and are about as "plug and play" as it gets. The nice thing is that their backup software only grabs data files. Backups are verified, and only modified files are backed up after the first backup. Backed up files are also directly readable (i.e. don't have to be decompressed by any given piece of software). It's the nicest backup solution I've ever used.</p>

[howard_owen]

<p>External drives can be an integral part of a backup strategy. One can buy a pre-packaged solution from vendors like WD, Seagate or LaCie, or one can buy the drive and the enclosure of choice and assemble them at home (it's not hard to do). <em>A quick note on LaCie: you're paying a premium for them to buy someone else's HD and stick it in a pretty case. Their longevity is not any better and may in fact be worse than average, at least that's the word on my street.</em></p>

<p>Now, back to business. I use both types of externals (pre-packaged and self-assembled) and I have numerous ext. HDs sitting on my shelf at the moment, some still in service (meaning not full). I finally got tired of the whole enclosure thing and just got a HD dock <a href="http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/FWU2ES2HDKOB/">http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/FWU2ES2HDKOB/</a> so I can stick the bare drive in it when I want to do a backup. This route is not for everyone, but I like it and I can't see myself going back to enclosures.</p>

<p>Now, a couple of words about enclosures and disks. <strong>Avoid cheap on both counts</strong>. Many cheap enclosures (<$40) have inferior bridge chipsets (the thing that translates your 0s and 1s into packets for USB, Firewire or eSATA transmission and reception). Bad chips mean bad things for your data, and, while major snafus are rare, they do happen. Oxford is a good chipset name; jMicron and Prolific are less so (sometimes <em>much</em> less). One advantage of buying an enclosure sans disk is you can see whose chipset is used, which is not always the case when buying an enclosure/disk combo from the likes of Seagate. Another potential failure point in cheaper units is the power supply (usually a wall wart). Some are especially prone to frying either themselves or the disk inside the enclosure. These all seem to be made in China by Hoo Noz Hoo, Inc. You can hope for the best here or find yourself a reliable 12V, ~3A supply to use with your single drive enclosures.</p>

<p>Now, on to the disks themselves. There are essentially two kinds of disks: those that have failed and those that are going to. Yes, we entrust our photos and other precious bits to hardware devices which have a failure rate of 100%. No point interjecting here that you have a 10 year old HD that runs just fine. Your disk is closer to failure now than it ever has been, so don't get cocky. :)</p>

<p>HD manufacturers seem to go through spates of bad product. Right now Seagate appears to be a name to avoid, much as the infamous IBM "Deathstar" was some years back. At present, I'm buying enterprise drives with the faint hope that the additional testing and, in some cases, more robust construction will pay dividends down the road. The E class really isn't much more expensive, but if you don't want to go that route, I've also got some WD Caviar Black drives in service that are holding their own. I don't buy "green" anything. The planet Earth is fine and it will continue to be fine no matter how much energy my equipment uses.</p>

<p>At the moment, I'm pretty fond of Hitachi drives. They also have some attractive pre-packaged options, some or all of which have the Oxford 924 or 934 chipset. Here's a sample <a href="http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-drive.cfm">http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-drive.cfm</a></p>

<p>Good luck.</p>

[Stock-Photos]

<p>I use two external drives to back-up data and photos. I have a <a href="http://www.wdc.com/en/PRODUCTS/index.asp?cat=8">WD MyBook.</a></p>

<p>and a <a href="http://www.wdc.com/en/PRODUCTS/index.asp?cat=9">WD My Passport.</a></p>

<p>Both work great. I keep one in my detached garage in case catastrophe strikes my home. I swap them each time I back-up.</p>

<p>BTW, the My Book model got knocked off a 3.5 foot high desk onto the floor.<br>

It still works fine.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.bhphotovideo.com/?BI=119">I recommend buying from B&H.</a></p>

[johncrosley]

<p>External Hard drive storage has come under a revolution lately. It is both incredibly cheap now and very,very reliable, (but only after you have burned in your unit for a period of two weeks to a month, as early failure rates reflected by sites such as NewEgg.com feedback, reflect that every brand has a significant failure rate due to lack of of adequate testing of each unit as it comes off the assembly line.<br>

Lesson: When you do buy an additional external unit and back up to it, do NOT delete anything backed up to it for at least two weeks to a month. In fact, NEVER delete anything backed up to a backup or it loses its function as a backup. It then becomes a primary and sole data source, prone to failure.<br>

I surmise I may be Photo.net's champion in external hard drive data storage. I have in California about 25 one terabyte, 1.5 terabyte and 2 terabyte hard drives for storage. In addition, the entire works is duplicated in a foreign country, at least to the point where I get from one country to the other.<br>

I have three or four hard drives at one time. When I download, I back up to three or four hard drives at one time. <br>

I have hard too many horror stories about photographers who have lost their entire collection of photos due to disaster.<br>

A photographer named 'Chaz', now retired, former chief photographer for Ladies Home Journal and Harpers Bazaar, had a life's work in a warehouse in Florida (with his former company, including shots of Jackie O and every major model in the world, destroyed by fire (no backup and no scans) His life's work destroyed.<br>

Photo.net member David Malcomson wrote me he had a major collection lost when he was scheduled for a major household move, he could not be there, and his photo collection turned up missing.<br>

An acquaintance and sometimes friend got into a squabble with a girlfriend in winter in Santa Cruz, CA. She threw his photos and everything photographic onto the front lawn in the rain in his absence and it moldered and was ruined, not backed up.<br>

Horror stories abound of life's work destroyed.<br>

It can happen from natural disaster so keeping a second copy at home is no guarantee, even in a fireproof safe, as they have a rate at which they will protect against 'burn' and beyond that, nothing and that's for singed paper, not hard drives which are more delicate.<br>

Optical media are subject to face,and can't be retrieved, and the so-called 'archival' media which sell for lots more money -- who's to trust them (and shell out tons of money and spend all that time making backup media and albums of DVDs only to wonder if they'll fade.<br>

I started by copying my media onto giant 1 terabyte Maxtor hard drives and also some to 500 gig and 1 terabyte Buffalo hard drives. Only one buffalo has failed me and although the USB port on one or more Maxtor has failed me the firewire ports have remained strong.<br>

As time has continued these hard drives have remained untouched and my 'bible' or source. Properties are checked and rechecked against copies and they are to the byte exactly perfect indicating not one byte of data loss.<br>

One buffalo 500 gig drive has suffered a crash.<br>

At one time, I bought two 500 gig Seagate freestyle hard drives and figured they must be stored (using plastic holders) vertically, for cooling. I backed up 15 downloads to one, then the other as its backup. I then touched the top with a toe, and it fell over on a concrete floor and crashed. A data recovery service took a look and shook its head. Well, I reasoned, I had a second, but just as I was about to back that one up,the same thing happened. and those downloads, are gone forever. <br>

What can go wrong will go wrong.<br>

I now can schlep five new 1.t terabyte hard drives with my laptop case and camera case on an International voyage -- three in my camera/lens bag and two next to my laptop.<br>

I have tried three: 1. The new black Seagate drives with a two year warranty are prone to failure: One has failed and others are prone to pre-failure 'clicking' noises. Avoid these. They are a bit cheaper than traditional Seagate drives but obviously quality shortcuts have been taken reflected in the shorter warranty.<br>

2. The small black USB expansion hard drive from Western digital bought on sale for less than $100 each at Fry's on introduction with USB only . . . and they have worked like a charm with no noise and no upsets. They also work on the same power sources as all my Seagate drives, although I am sure the manufacture with disavow this. They are the new standard for me, at 1.5 terabyte for under $100.<br>

3. For general 'knockabout' use the Seagate Free Agent (silver) drives have proved workhorses and I have never had a failure (other than kicking over 2 500 gig drives that crashed a year ago) I feel they are reliably made and will withstand international travel quite well.<br>

(save boxes, as international carry-on rules being instituted may require such drives being checked in the future. The boxes they are shipped in are rather shock absorbent, rather than being in luggage where the TSA and other inspectors may move them around next to the edge of a suitcase where they will get banged around, even if YOU cushion them inside clothes deep inside your suitcase.<br>

It is senseless to buy anything less than 1 terabyte; my last Seagate Free Agent pro purchase was $67 each on sale for 1 terabyte (Fry's Electronics on Dec. 26, Manhattan Beach and chain wide.)<br>

Two are still unopened; you cannot touch the same thing in Ukraine for less than twice the price, though prices are competitive with low US list prices (not sale prices).<br>

Beware 500 gig and other sizes, you will load up everything you can onto such hard drives, photos, music, videos and you'll find plenty of use for them.<br>

Although i now have about 45-50 hard drives (mostly Seagate/Buffalo (Samsung),and a few outliers, the photos are no more than six or seven terabytes, copied multiple times then copies ready to be distributed to a couple of sites world wide.<br>

It's cheaper to have redundant copies in multiple locations than to buy the best single hard drive or archival optical media. If a hard drive starts to go bad, simply recopy over it, and reuse it, or put it out of service; new drives promise to be cheaper yet.<br>

There is no excuse any longer for losing a photo collection -- if you are worried about that.<br>

BEWARE any data storage service that offers to store your photos on-line.<br>

Nikon's storage service requires that you sign over to them your copyrights. Be especially worried about that one. Do not use it.<br>

Digital Railroad, used for sales by pros and recommended to me enthusiastically, suddenly went bankrupt. A bankruptcy court allowed sale of their servers with all their media to be made and the servers to be 'wiped clean' of all data. It all was lost.<br>

One company that did digital storage (I forget which) had an exec who had a bright idea: he'd compress all the data to get a bonus. He did that and told no one except his boss to get his bonus. He had taken the original data of tens of thousands of photographers and destroyed its value a full data photos, in order to get a bonus for saving server expenses.<br>

So, beware of 'cloud computing and 'cloud storage' -- it's good as a promise,but it can be knocked out by terrorists, and by a corporate administration that changes, a software glitch, a bad employee, vandalism over which you have no control, if nudes are stored (by fundamentalist religionists) I(happened tome on a hard drive sent to HP once, drive wiped clean, then destroyed by a Fundamentalist Christian, who saw what he thought were heathen images (photo.net nudes) (HP bought me a new laptop).</p>

<p>What can go wrong will.<br>

You have control of your own photos.<br>

Trust no one but yourself.<br>

I do.<br>

I'm preparing copies of my files to go to a friend in Rome for storage in a safe there, in case of multiple disasters; good friend. <br>

Drives are getting smaller and soon for most photographers one collection for backup will fit on a one or two terabyte hard drive bought for less than $200 now, with prices falling.<br>

There's no longer any excuse for letting photos get destroyed.<br>

{I did have nature photos not intended for use other than myself stolen and not backed up other than the backup that was with them . . . . .but they had little worth . . . . . other than the media . . . . .as i am not a bird photographer . . . . of note. That is a chance I knowingly took.)<br>

John (Crosley)</p>

 

[garrison_k.]

<p>Everything has been burned to dvd up to now, right???</p>

<p>A western Digital 500 gig and a great enclosure. Should be around $100. I'd buy two of those hdd's though and make a dupilcate and get it as far aways as possible from the other one.</p>

<p>Then, a third method is to store them in the clouds. If you have a gmail account, you get a bit of storage with your free picasa account. For a few bucks more, you get gigs a year for dirty cheap. I'm thinking of doing this and doing it with gmail/picasa because it is very shortly going to be a Google world out there.</p>

[sam_zaydel1]

<p>I have to agree with the external enclosure approach. The added benefit of using it is that it is upgradeable, as your capacity requirements grow, it is often cheaper, some allow for redundant configurations, and you can re-purpose disk drives that you replace with higher capacity drives. I personally always lean towards a dedicated storage server, which is what I run myself, but my storage requirements are far greater. I also always advise to backup your backup. I spent enough years in IT to tell you that 2-tier backup is almost a must...</p>

[johncrosley]

<p>With respect to the prior post from K. Garrison, in the past we have seen:<br>

(1) terms in posting to web sites that supposedly 'store' data that assign copyrights to the party that stores them (e.g., Nikon's new storage and sharing site will own the copyright to any photos you put on the site. <br>

I have not yet examined the Google/Picasa terms, but they are surely going to be self-serving and protect them from any liability in case they make a mistake. they may even take your copyright.<br>

You have no or little protection in case suddenly somebody takes your full resolution photos and decides to apply image compression to them, which has happened before on 'cloud' storage sites. <br>

Such things have happened before either intentionally because capitalists either (1) didn't understand the value of full-size images to the serious photographer, or (2) figured that for those who did care, few would raise a stink and could not or would not afford litigation, and finally damages would be speculative in any case and therefore impossible to prove thus making them impossible to award. You would then be owed nothing.</p>

<p>Contracts in such instances are so one-sided (terms of use contracts) that in the event of 'cloud' failure or deliberate or inadvertent compression of images, you're gonna pay the price with lost images and literally be out the images (except perhaps 'basic jpegs' for memories) while some fat-cat ambitious manager gets a bonus for saving server space. <br>

Worse, what if your credit card doesn't process for the extra storage -- and you're out of touch such as 'on vacation' or you have a changed card number of bank or e-mail address and you don't find out?<br>

I recently had a friend in Europe send me photos in the US and I send him full-size originals from the US through Yahoo's new 'attachment' account, but when I compared 'file sizes' they had been horribly compressed. <br>

What went out as very large files, had been greatly compressed, and we were trying to work and transmit full size files, since Yahoo announced HUGE file transfer (but they fudged, the file transfer total could be huge but individual files had the heck compressed out of them). <br>

There is no guarantee that when you send something to the clouds something won't compress those images for storage and retrieval, even if they are bloated back up when returned.<br>

Terms of service may allow them to wipe their servers clean of your images if here's a billing dispute or they claim nonpayment, or even if your credit card bill does not pay them timely whether or not you know about it. Maybe they got payment but it went to a different account. (I once got a credit card issued to a John A. Xeoalway (the name Crosley was transposed on a keyboard and came out Xeoalway. Mistakes happen, and a mistake could wipe out your photo cache.)<br>

Most of your most careless friends wouldn't even throw out your photos, but companies would, although friends might misplace hard drives left in their care.<br>

Further, cloud storage' such as Nikon's allows others to browse among your treasured images and even if you forbid copying, there are ways to do so, and the contract absolves the host of the cloud from liability. I haven't discovered yet how much strangers can peer through your Picasa web albums or if your storage can be made completely private but privacy probably should be an important consideration, especially in this 'file sharing' world and especially if your images might have commercial promise, say as a nude image of a beautiful woman scheduled for Photo.net posting or a beautiful landscape of a national park with a large format camera suitable for a calendar.<br>

'Cloud' may be a great way to obtain software that you wouldn't use every day and don't want to invest in wish to rent instead. or use some company's proprietary 'cloud' software such as Google envisions with word processing, but for image data storage - especially primary storage - and most of all 'personal' data, it's a very poor solution, and if you shoot nudes, imagine the issues with models if their images without your permission hit the file sharing networks such as bit torrent or LimeWire, wrongly copied from your site.<br>

You won't have this issue if you store on personal hard drives in your possession or those of people you trust and are secured, perhaps encoded (encrypted).<br>

I've considered 'Cloud' storage numerous times, and i've rejected it. Any company, no matter how strong, can go bankrupt at any time and a bankruptcy court (as in Digital Railroad's case) can give bankruptcy trustees premission to wipe hard drives clean of your imags without liability. <br>

Businesses can and do go out of business periodically, and the security of your photos then becomes of last importance to them . . . . even General Motors just went bankrupt. Saab no longer will be in business soon. <br>

Nobody wants them. <br>

Don't assume that just because a company's big and has a big reputation your photos will be 'safe'. Look at the troubles 'Bank of America' has been in and 'Citigroup' as well and how Merrill Lynch got eaten up after almost dying.<br>

Enough said?<br>

You now can buy on sale a terabyte and a half for less than $100 at Fry's Electronics (Western Digital) during certain sales. I did so at Christmas, and believe me, every extra storage gigabyte will be filled up, and if not with photos, with music and movies. You'll find a use for the space.<br>

Two terabyte and half hard drives for $200 total on sale should serve your needs for a very long time, but be sure if one goes out, that you instantly replace and back up the remaining images -- or again you're in the same boat you are in now -- no backup. <br>

Hard drives do fail, and if they're similar and came from an identical batch the likelihood is they will fail at about the same time, too, if you run them about the same number of hours. <br>

Also, they are not considered reliable until you've run them a month . . . . due to today's lack of burning in at factories and mass manufacturing methods. Returns are built in as a cost of doing business for manufacturers and instead of zero tolerance for returns, they have an 'acceptable' failure rate they aim for, or so it seems, realistically. <br>

Bad drives do ccome out of good factories.<br>

I once had three or four 2-1/2 inch laptop size drives used as USB-powered storage fail one after the other, which I brought to Seagate's President's office's attention. They were very generous about it; since I saved them from a HUGE manufacturing problem and essentially was the canary in the coal mine, so they could fix a problem right away.<br>

When we settled my problem with them paying to recover data (never covered), and replacing hard drives and sending me a CASE of hard drives, they then got a sample of my failed ones to send to their factory to tear apart to find out what the heck was wrong.<br>

Their handling of the issue was a textbook case of how to handle a complaint correctly.<br>

However, I never have had an Iomega hard drive that has worked. Period. Bad Luck? Some people swear by them.<br>

By the say, Seagate was very good about stepping up the the plate (after a very unsatisfactory initial experience with their customer service) which is why I drove to their President's office and through his secretary and a V.P. fixed everything, which I think saved them maybe millions by 'listening' instead of fighting -- they were able to change their manufacturing promptly so more of their drives didn't fail slowly and over time.<br>

Iomega was just the opposite. They didn't want to admit their problems or fix them. <br>

Just go away, was basically Iomega's message, which is what I've done.<br>

I vote for hard drives, large ones, and separating them, placing them in ultra safe places, not just in one house (houses can burn) or even in one state or region (regions in California for instance can burn, even almost whole counties; floods can be region-wide. Electrical surges can be widespread and knock out appliances which are not even 'on' even if stored with a neighbor and protected even by 'surge protection' devices - useless if the surge is close enough and strong enough.<br>

Multiple backups widely separated are the key to safety in preparing data<br>

A friend was in charge of facilities for a HUGE worldwide data storage company in Palo Alto in the 1989 quake, and their building was in danger of being shut down by the building inspectors for weeks, until they could get clearance to re-open.<br>

They had NO BACKUP SITE ready to go and worse, no plans even to have one installed. (cheap management -- meaning directors as the President was nobody's fool).<br>

To shut them down, even for a few hours, would have put them out of business, and deprived the world's researchers of vital information for weeks, possibly months.<br>

She wheedled and got a building inspection within a half hour to an hour and a half (later it took weeks) and without her wheedling her company would probably have gone bankrupt (she was employee of the year that year).<br>

I learned a lesson from that.<br>

Everything that can go wrong with your data will -- sooner or later.<br>

If you are prepared, it won't make any difference.<br>

John (Crosley)as</p>

[twmeyer]

<p>This port:</p>

<p>http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153066&Tpk=thermaltake%20blacx</p>

<p>plus any eSATA internal drive you want... t</p>

[garrison_k.]

<p>That was a tough read.</p>

[tanagawizi]

<p>I thought I had replied to this thread.<br>

Just wanted to say a massive thanks to all for such great information. I have a lot to digest and hopefully will make a good decision!</p>

<p>Many thanks<br>

Barney</p>