portable storage options

Mirlyn

Mirlyn

Well-Known Member
I'm looking for external hard drive experiences/recommendations. Cam and I are photo buffs with a growing portfolio. We bought the camera in March, and already have a photo collection of nearly 10 gigs. Right now, they're on my WD SATA Raptor in my home desktop (makes them very fast in loading). However, we'd both like to have access to them at home, work, and in the field (via laptop). These pictures are very large...some up to 5 megs each (not counting tiffs), so speed/responsiveness is of the essence when dealing with folders and folders of pics in thumbnail view.

While Cam's Toshiba has firewire, my Dell does not, so USB 2.0 is a requirement. What about power supplies...I'm torn between the standard AC adaptor or the ability to power off USB (which I've heard can cause burned out USB ports, significantly lower battery life on laptops, etc, but is ideal for mobile situations (road/field)). Most importantly, how reliable are these things? I will plan on syncing it with an internal drive just in case, but still...

I'm looking at the WD 120GB WDXUB1200BBNN as a possible option. Dunno yet. Comments?
 
This is what I use.

I like an enclosure because I swap drives (they're pretty reasonable after all). It was inexpensive and I needed something right away when I got it. I actually find it fairly fast. The biggest drive I'm using is an 80GB Hitachi. The power brick takes a standard power cord which is useful. I keep one dangling on my desk, desk at work and workbench so I'm always ready to go. It's kind of a cheesy looking unit, but it works great.
 
Rusty and I use this.

We've had pretty good luck with it. I took have a ton of digital pictures and copy them from my 120gb internal drive to the 160gb external drive and then burn them to CD from the external drive occasionally too. It may be overkill but they're very important to me.

Actually, copying files to and from the external drive is faster than copying them to and from the memory card. The drive is a little heavy for my taste but other than that, I have no complaints.

It does have a seperate ac adapter in addition to the USB cable. And New Egg's price is fairly good, I thought.
 
catocom said:
The 8mb cache drives may do better. :confused:
It's comparable to transferring over a 10mbps lan.
Click to expand...
Think upgrading to the 8mb cache would result in a noticable difference, despite the USB bottleneck?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top