Is there a reason why you want to store the images on a hard drive rather than just burning to them to CD's or DVD's?

Edited by - Bill on 1/14/2005 1:13:56 AM

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I burn them to DVD now but that is getting to be a rather LARGE collection of DVD's. One single photo shoot can usually fit on a single DVD but things like the AEE take more than one. Needless to say my "back-up" DVD collection is almost as big as my regular DVD collection.

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I did this with an IBM (now Hitachi) 80GB drive and an external Firewire enclosure (probably from fwdepot.com) a couple of years ago for my iBook. There are dual USB2/Firewire enclosures these days.

I primarily use this external drive for my iTunes music library, but I can boot from it as well, just in case something goes awry with my laptop's internal drive (which it has, once).

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It appears to be a ~$130 drive repackaged in a hot-swappable external enclosure for almost $90 extra dollars. The warranty is one year.

By contrast, a barebones IDE drive might be around that same price point, but the manufacturer's warranty on the drive itself is five years. The additional cost of an external drive enclosure is negligible at this point.

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I've got a fanless external enclosure (IcyBox) that I stuck a Seagate Barracuda drive in, I had laying around.
Works great too. Totally silent, even when the drive is active. And despite being fanless, the drive has never gotten more than lukewarm to the touch.

Whatever you choose, do make sure it's quiet.
I tried putting in an old Deskstar drive first. The high pitched whine drove me nuts in the five minutes before I exchanged it for the Barracuda. Ahh, sweet silence.

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I've got a Maxtor OneTouch 120 GB (7200 rpm, USB 2.0). As Kperv wrote above, it looks well, works well and it's quiet. I don't remember the price (bought it about 7 months ago). I also had to buy a USB2 I/O-card, since my (quite) old computer had no USB support.

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Should fill your needs for a while And they got bigger ones if the need arises

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Is there such a thing as an ethernet enclosure for a hard drive?

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Chipsets for USB and Ethernet aren't that expensive. And microcontrollers with a Linux port are also available for a few Dollars.
Care to make your own? Feel free to post the PCB layout when you're done.

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Bad thing about living in Hawaii is that net prices don't usually do you much good as the shipping ends up making it cost pretty much the same as in the store.

Next question - some of the ready made ones seem to be able to have the boot from function in the case of system failure and others don't. Is there an easy way to tell? Or am I just missing something in the verbage on these things?

cv - per your suggestion I am now looking at an enclosure and drive seperately as well. Prices are better but for someone as technically inept as myself I kind of like the automatic save features some of the ready made ones come with.

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In many cases, you may be able to install an operating system on an external drive to make it an alternate boot device.

Now that you've explained it Lee, you may want a ready-made external drive. The prices are generally higher, but easy-to-use backup software may be included. Based on your situation/technical prowess, I recommend you look for a drive with good software and a generous warranty. (Sorry, I don't know what's considered "good consumer backup software" for Wintel.)

I opted for the do-it-yourself method since I'm a former UNIX-head and I have shell scripts that backup my important files.

Good luck.

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If so how and what type?

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If so how and what type?

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I agree not having the power switch is annoying - the Maxtor is like that. It's an older one in the red and white case.

I helped my sister set up a massive Western Digital over Christmas. It came with all kind of fancy features such as media readers and one button or timed incremental backup. It was also very fast and connected via USB AND Firewire at the same time (you could just hook it up to one or the other if you wanted). It was reasonably priced at Circuit City.

-- Snowman

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See: LaCie external hard drives @ newegg.com

~ GaySatyr (ABB)

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I saw in the local Fry's ad around here tonight, a case for a 2 1/2 inch drive for just $9.99 after rebate. That's a deal!

-- Snowman

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the important things are quality of the actual drive, chipset on the controller and cooling ability. you can't do better than a seagate 7200.8 or spinpoint with an oxford chipset.

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JamesBoston, email me when you have a minute. I want to ask you something about a DVD player you recommended.

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Why couldn't I have a surname that I could whore out for any stupid little thing at all? Life is so unfair.

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I'm sure we could find a company that would stamp your name on a butt plug.

"The Anal Invader, designed by H. Patel"

If you only use your first initial it adds an air of sophistication and arrogance to your brand. Drop the first initial and you're instantly hip.

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Quaze

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Quaze

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Also: earlier firmware of the 500 gb had an incompatibility with SP2 and data were corrupted. LaCie has admitted the shortcoming, replaced the flawed firmware but forgot to warn people who had already bought an expensive 500 gb Big Disk.

So, the bottom line is: if all you need is an external drive, there are cheaper solutions or stick to the d2's.
If all you need is raid, even cheap motherboards have a raid controller nowadays.

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btw, your site is phenomenal, i can almost make sense of a few of the girls and their 5 names.

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http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=17-145-127&depa=0

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Also be careful about the quality of the connection for both disk signals and especially power. Many seem to not fully seat one or the other connector.

I personally like that AM Seletronics DS3 series. The drive seats well and seems to have adequate (though not great) ventilation. Available with both 1394 and USB2 or [ invalid url ]

Kperv mentions the Linksys NSLU2 (affectionately known as the "SLUg"). This is a different sort of thing, a cheap NAS or even fileserver. If all you need is a drive there's no point. Buffalo Tech sells some with an internal drive I'm playing with right now. They definitely have their place but maybe not for this.

Booting from USB: Hardware should have said "Most modern BIOS will allow booting from ... USB devices, often poorly". It is not recommended.

The best external disk system for both booting and performance for video work (short of $$$ SCSI) may be the [ invalid url ] series. These use a high-speed serial-ATA link to the external drive. They have both sATA enclosures and IDE enclosures (with internal "Tailgate" IDE-sATA adapters). This is a cheap solution.

You aren't likely to see the extra performance of Firewire 800 yet so I wouldn't worry about it now.

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the other knock on a lot of firewire enclosures is the prolific chipset, one of the most common, is bad news. by the company's admission it corrupts data sometimes and you've gotta find a patch and flash it which apparently kills some of them. you've got a good chance of ending up with a prolific.

jrv, are you talking about the "kuro box" or the linkstation with the drive included? i've seen a bunch of reviews for buffalo's storage stuff, all of them positive.

another thing you could do to improve ambient temps is NOT buy a faster 7200rpm drive. if you're not using it heavily, 5400rpm won't be a noticable difference and it's cooler and quieter. ultimately, if you're doing serious, mission-critical stuff for clients or something a laptop is crazy. a decent case, motherboard, cpu and ram probably cost 400 dollars. drop a card in for raid and you've got faster data access or you can sleep better if you go the redundancy -route. that and a terabyte is probably the same as a terabyte of lacies at around a grand. or if your job depends on it, go for some expensive scsi stuff in an ugly yet functional case.

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The IcyBox is a completely closed aluminium enclosure with no ventilation at all.

Very quiet.

I've never had any problems with this setup. The drive hadn't overheated even after several hours continuous activity.

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The only reason I can think of Lee might want to use a Kuro or SLUg is if he wants to have his files accessible over the internet without leaving a server running at home all of the time, i.e., he could VPN from his notebook in the US and have access to all of his files while traveling. A Kuro or SLUg probably consume 20-25 watts as compared to 100+ watts for a desktop (plus air conditioning costs, etc).

The SLUg can be configured to replicate a disk's contents to another disk or another server based on a user-define schedule. The Kuro runs Linux and you can do whatever backup you want, if you know how to do it in Linux....

For someone like Lee I'd recommend a pre-configured USB2 external case. For someone like Qaze (video editing) I'd recommend HighPoint e.SATA if an external solution is needed. Back up both with whatever tools you use to back up the system.

Keep in mind that an external hard drive must not be bumped while spinning: put it out of the way & out of reach. The gyroscopic affects on a spindle can be enormous if moved.

Drives don't necessarily burst into flames or otherwise fail immediately in an obvious manner when abused. It often shows up as a shortened lifespan & early replacement.

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Whether the Barracuda is a relatively cool running drive, or the aluminium case manages to dissipate some of the heat, even though the cover doesn't touch the top of the drive, I don't know.

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seagate's drives are considerably less noisy and generally run ten degrees lower than WD, maxtor, and hitachi ones and the 7200.8's are even quieter. samsung makes quiet drives with good thermals, although they don't get any bigger than 160gb and don't have ncq or any new features.

seagate's pretty hard to go wrong with, they're the only drive out there that uses native SATA instead of a bridge. it's just one more conversion that can go wrong-kinda like you don't want to convert d/a and back in audio.

those buffalo kurobox things look cool, i really can't imagine why i'd need one, but maybe i'll justify it somehow down the road.

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Bill

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