Best External Hard Drive For DVD Collection?

- You'll want to use Handbrake to rip them to your drive.

- Unless you're looking for a good design, you can get good ones much cheaper than the Apple Store offers.

- HD 45 minute shows are roughly 1 GB.

- I have a Western Digital My Book and absolutely love it. Here's a 2 TB one at Amazon for 189.99. You could probably even find it cheaper.

If you are talking about making a raw backup of DVDs, your best bet is RipIt. It will strip most protections and rip DVD to a folder of your choice. From there on, you can use DVD Player to open as if you are watching from a physical disk.

DVD being 4-8 GB in sizes, 2 TB will be enough for about 300 or so DVDs.

If you don't care about menus and all the extra stuff on the DVD, you can use an app like Handbrake (free) or iFlicks ($19.99) to extract the main feature and transcode into H.264 format. Between the two apps, iFlicks is more powerful and easier to use but Handbrake does the job just fine for most purpose. For typical DVD 2-hour movie, these apps will generate H.264 file about 1-1.5 GB in size.

As for TV shows, it depends on whether it's SD or HD. A typical 1-hour show (about 45 minutes without commercials) is about 600-700 MB for HD and 200-300 MB for SD.

As for the choice of hard disk, I would just get whatever "green" USB external that is reasonably priced, such as WD Elements ($150 for 2 TB, $200 for 3 TB). Green drives are not as fast as higher-end drives, but runs cooler and as such, tend to be more reliable.

I have 4th generation Time Capsule 2 TB and it's actually quite good (not at all hot like previous generation). But I prefer to keep backup and media drives separate.

Yeah unfortunately the Time Capsule was only meant for wireless backups however you can get away with it storing regular content on there. And for the price right now compared to the way drive prices are going/are at its kind of a good deal if you need a wireless appliance.

I'd say if you want wireless access to your content the Time Capsule is a good choice or the G-Drives are also reliable they're from Hitachi and I prefer that brand.

another source to check out:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...07601 600030763 600030784&IsNodeId=1&name=2TB

Not trying to go off topic but will any external hdd work with Lion? As I am probably going to be moving from Windows 7 to Lion in the future so this is important.

Trav29 said:

Not trying to go off topic but will any external hdd work with Lion? As I am probably going to be moving from Windows 7 to Lion in the future so this is important.

Click to expand...

Yeah you'll just need to re-format it if it came as NFTS. Takes about 2 minutes to do.

If your Video stuff is going to be difficult to replace easily, then you might want to consider a 2 drive RAID NAS as a store. This will give you some insurance against a single drive failure but is going to be a bit more expensive.
Netgear has a new range (Duo V2) and there are Buffalo and WD versions.
These should also be able to be used as Time Machine locations (I know the Netgear one does).

I'd personally go with a Synology or Qnap NAS. I picked up a QNAP for my music and aperture library. I can this being a good fit as well