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Pleased with your External HD for Photo Storage

M

mikeyman13

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 2, 2007
20
0
I bought a D5000 about a year ago, and now I need to start saving all of my media on an external drive instead of my iMac's HD.

Curious on what people are using right now and whether they are pleased. Looking for a 1TB external drive, which I see ranging from $60-$150. I will be backing up my external as well in case of failure.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

- Mike
 
I have a Western Digital MyBook Studio that I use for Time Machine backups. At one time I had a seperate backup folder for my photos on that drive, but it would glitch out on me every once and awhile. I put my photo backup and Aperture vault on a USB 250 GB drive and left my WD for Time Machine only and have had no trouble with that setup.

Most people on this forum are backup freaks. We keep duplicates of our photos on at least three drives. One on the computer, one on an external kept at home or work and a third that we take with us when we leave. All this guards against 1) user error 2) fire or theft.

Dale
 
Designer Dale said:
I have a Western Digital MyBook Studio that I use for Time Machine backups. At one time I had a seperate backup folder for my photos on that drive, but it would glitch out on me every once and awhile. I put my photo backup and Aperture vault on a USB 250 GB drive and left my WD for Time Machine only and have had no trouble with that setup.

Most people on this forum are backup freaks. We keep duplicates of our photos on at least three drives. One on the computer, one on an external kept at home or work and a third that we take with us when we leave. All this guards against 1) user error 2) fire or theft.

Dale
Click to expand...

Yeah, my main concern about moving everything to my external is that I will lose my pictures in the process; therefore, I plan to keep them on my computer until I am sure that I have done it correctly. My computer is running so slow now that it is not an option to keep them on my computer any longer.
 
mikeyman13 said:
I bought a D5000 about a year ago, and now I need to start saving all of my media on an external drive instead of my iMac's HD.

Curious on what people are using right now and whether they are pleased. Looking for a 1TB external drive, which I see ranging from $60-$150. I will be backing up my external as well in case of failure.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

- Mike
Click to expand...

I have an eSATA card in my Mac Pro and a USB/eSATA drive dock that allows me to hot swap drives- so I can back up then take a drive off-site and slap a new drive in and back up again.

Paul
 
I've accumulated a number of externals from different manufacturers; Western Digital has the largest representation among them. I've yet to have any issues with data loss, despite lukewarm reviews for one of the My Books I bought a few years ago. Can't speak to eSATA as USB 2.0 is fast enough for me. A couple of Maxtor drives have been problematic (DOA or shortly thereafter) at my job, as well as a Lacie Porsche edition that was a bit long in the tooth.
 
I got the Western Digital drive (in my sig). Its awesome because its silent, doesn't heat up, and very cheap (got it from amazon for $80). The only problem it has is that its a usb drive. If you want a usb drive then its perfect. If you want a firewire drive then get the LaCie one that other users have recommended.
 
I've had good success with Other World Computing drives. I use the Mercury Elite AL Pro. (I like them all to match:rolleyes:) I've been using them for years now and have had no issues. They are all for backup though. I still keep my main library on the computers hard drive.

As Dale stated...I'm moving deaper into the "backup freak" category. I keep two Aperture vaults, back up the Ap library on Time Machine, and use Flickr, Zenfolio, and Me.com to backup some of my favorites online. Next step is to upgrade my current drives and then use an older drive to send a backup offsite to my brothers house.

What's really eating into my space right now is the iTunes library and it's backup.
 
I just go to Sam's Club and buy a 2TB WD hard drive whenever I need one. So far I haven't had any problem with these drives. As I understand it, a Firewire drive is not longer needed to restart new Macs. However, while i do set the external USB-2 drives to restart my iMac (should I have to), I haven't had the need to do so. I use a 2TB as a backup drive, and the rest as photo storage devices. A 2-TB WD drive costs around $149.00, and comes pre-formatted for Mac/PC. But I still reformat it with Disk Utility.

By the way, I only connect and turn the external drives when I need to. The rest of the time they are disconnected from my Mac, and turned off.
 
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