Storage of Pictures

I am looking at buying an external hard drive for storing my pictures. I take a few hundred a month...what size should I get and what brand?

I use both Western Digital and Seagate. The best price per space generally works out to be the 3 GB externals, which is what I like to use. They run between $100 to $140 on Amazon. The Back Up Plus is more expense due to the back up software that comes with it, so unless you need that program, buy the Seagate 3 GB w/o the Back Up Plus.

I think you mean 3 TeraBytes ,,, and remember,, to buy two drives! and keep two copies,, these disks can fail!,, I have had one fail this year,, and thank goodness of the dual storage, 4 hours later, back to dual data.

Thank you!

I have 4 Seagate external drives, all different sizes. I have a 320 GB, 500 GB, 2 TB and 3 TB. I have several because they really do crash. My first one (320 Gb) crashed but one day it randomly started working. My 2 TB just didn't work well from the start. I left it on the shelf too long and made it worse. The 3 TB is great. I bought mine for $90.00 on Black Friday at Best Buy. Western Digital is also a very good brand. Highly recommend from a friend of mine. He says that they may cost more for less storage, but they are built better and crash less often, or do not crash as easily. I just had to learn how to take care of my external hard drives. My drives crashed because of user error, forgetfulness and procrastination. Now I know better. : )

To add in... get a drive that is set up for USB 3.0 - USB 3.0 is backwards compatible to USB 2.0 slots.

Everything you see and use is USB 2.0 - USB 3.0 is considerably faster, but no where near what is advertised, and will eventually become as standard as USB 2.0 is now.

stmv said:

I think you mean 3 TeraBytes ,,, and remember,, to buy two drives! and keep two copies,, these disks can fail!,, I have had one fail this year,, and thank goodness of the dual storage, 4 hours later, back to dual data.

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Doh!! (head slap). Yes, thank you. I did mean 3 TB's. Sadly, I remember when the notion of a gigabyte seemed like a wide open and empty desert with enough room to park a truck in.

Work out how much space a few hundred pictures take up in space, multiply that by 12 months, and then double that number again - that's the smallest size drive you should buy (as you want the drive to last at least a couple of years).

Now double the price/budget, and get two drives for backup purposes, and keep them in seperate rooms or even one in a fire proof safe.

Seagate, Western Digital both do external drives and to be honest, whether you get a good one or not seems to be varied from one person to the next. I've had mixtures of drives from most of the big manufacturers and some fail, some have lasted years, and some from the same size and batch have had failures and success!!

With regards to backup software to external drives (or even internal drives or network drives), there's no need to buy any expensive software what so ever.
There's an absolutely amazing free bit of MS software that will do backups with a whole array of options.... Robocopy.
If anyone wants or needs help using it, let me know.

The least expensive external drives are generally use a USB adapters, so don't forget... Mine is a 1Tb Ethernet drive plugged into my router. This allows all computers on my network to access it. Finally, computers usually have a limited number of USB ports. Three or Four port USB hubs are relatively cheap because they use the computer's power supply to power the hub. Any larger than a 4-port hub, would require one with a built in power supply.

Any USB powered drive (generally only 2.5" or smaller) can be powered by the 500mA of a USB2 port. One port can allow up to 127 devices to be daisy chained to it (however, worth noting that a physical port may actually be part of a logical port, and only 127 devices in total can be linked to a logical USB port (assuming you're not exceeding the power output of each physical port!!)

Larger 'desktop drives (3.5" drives) need a 12V connection and are always powered externally.

Network attached drives/storage (also known as NAS) is a whole different ball game, as you then have a specific enclosure designed to hold one or more drives and made available via your home network.

A variant of a NAS is a DAS (Direct Attached Storage). It's simply an external hard drive box which allows one or more drives to be connected direct to your computer (much like a NAS, just using a USB or eSATA connection).

I'm a techie as my paying occupation. I can tell you that they ALL fail! Makes no difference which brand. Seagate and western digital are by far the most common drives in any device. Even if you get an off branded external drive, 90% chance there will be a Western Digital or Seagate drive inside. Important to have redundant backup though, remember, they ALL fail.


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