Hard drive advice?
 

I want to get a second hard drive for storing all my pictures. I've got some kind of large Dell tower. Optiplex or something like that. It's around two years old. Has an empty slot, I think. XP Home.

I'm fairly ignorant about my choices and the pros and cons of them.

I know there are external ones that must have USB connections. They seem like they would be simple to set up and might work with a future machine more easily. Might be slower though.

Then there are internal ones which might be tricky to set up but maybe faster/ cheaper?

I really have no clue. If you were looking to get a second drive, what would you look for? Which brands are good brands? Which are bad? What's a decent brand for a decent price? I'm guessing around 200-500 GB would be good, but don't even really know that much. Have 80 GB now, but it's filling up fast with two newer higher pixel cameras.

Please educate me.

External is convenient since you aren't required to open your case and install a bare drive, ground yourself, etc. I got a 500gb LaCie external that is perfect for me and my ridiculous amounts of photos for around $100 by shopping around a bit online at places like Tigerdirect, Newegg, and Buy.com. Given the info that UT and others gave me about hard drive life in terms of time the disk spends spinning, and also you saying that is for photos, I would opt for an external that you can turn off when not in use over an internal which will be on whenever the computer is turned on.

I also made sure when I purchased my new computer last winter that it had a dvd burner so I can make backups of all my photos separate from from my two hard drives. That's also something to consider since your average blank cd holds around 700mb of data whereas a single layer blank dvd holds around 4.7gb.

In terms of speed, externals are a tad slower because they have to run their data through USB. I've read, but have no experience, that firewire is faster than usb 2.0, and some externals come with a firewire connection. Though that is more a Mac than a PC thing, but some PC's do have the connections. That all being said, I have no trouble streaming video from my usb 2.0 connected hard drive.

Bullitt, as usual, covers the facts well. I have one thing to add.

Buy the external drive* and quit worrying. BUT, buy two, and then use one to back up the other on a regular basis. You can have one connected to the system all the time as the new overflow reservoir of digital data, and then on backup day, you haul out its twin and do a backup. Put the backup twin away, in a different location, until next time.

Keep taking pictures. Rinse, repeat.

Are the brands pretty much all the same for performance and reliability? Are any brands known duds?

Edit: Oh, and I've been backing everything up to DVD, but they are not convenient for finding the shot you want unless you know the date it was taken.

Good for you for backing up. Perhaps it is helpful to you to consider the backups as the place to go to get your data back when it disappears from the regular location. From that perspective, some small inconvenience at sorting through the discs is irrelevant compared to the joy of still having live copies of your pictures.

Below is a screenshot of a sample of how I organize my pictures. I create, on the external hard drive, a series of folders.

Pictures, which contains folders corresponding to years.

Years, which each contain folders corresponding to months.

Months, which each contain folders corresponding to the event in question. Sometimes these leaf (terminal) folder names are repeated. For example, I take pictures each month that belong to the category of Misc. Kids is another recurring theme for me.

This method has several advantages. All my pictures are in one place. Not like your system where they're scattered over several discs. My pictures are "online", available at a click. I


nevermind.

glatt:

We covered this before.

Mine are all on the C: drive in one place, and backed up to DVDs as well. But the 80 GB hard drive is almost full, and it has everything on it, not just pictures. So I want to move these pictures to another hard drive and use the C: drive for the normal junk found on a PC. I'll also continue to back up the pictures to DVDs.

So no word on manufacturers? I guess they are all the same, and I should just shop by price/size/speed?

There's the big guys like Seagate and Western Digital. The one I purchased was LaCie and it's worked great for me so far.

I'm sorry, glatt. I focused on the unimportant part of your question. My apologies.

Yes, all the first tier manufacturers are approximately equal to five decimal places in terms of performance and reliability for your uses. IBM, Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, Fujitsu... they make the good stuff (apologies to the other good stuff makers, just listing these off the top of my head). I stand by my two drive strategy, but whichever one you get should be ok.

Capacity is a concern and it is proportional to cost. You should look for features like USB 2.0, perhaps an enclosure that includes a cooling fan (this cuts both ways. a fan lets the drive run cooler, which is all good for the drive, but it introduces another mechanical component which may fail. and any drive that "needs" a fan in the enclosure certainly should have one, not a busted one...but I digress). SATA or PATA drives are the newest technology, contrasted to IDE or EIDE. You might include in your shopping evaluations the option to assemble your own versus a preassembled package.

More laterz.

Probably not the best solution by itself, but I back up my photos by putting them on my hosting space. I pay about 7 something a month for it. Then I installed a free gallery software and just import them all into the gallery website. Now, not only are the photos backed up, but they are all sorted out and I can point friends and relatives to them, if I want. I use Coppermine, because it is pretty easy. I can also control the level of privacy on specific albums, so, you know, if I had, say, naked pictures of myself, my parents aren't subjected to porn or whatever. So, there is that, too. With this idea, be sure to pay your monthly fee, or they dump everything. :P

I also periodically back stuff up on DVD, as well, but that seems to have failed me, as a backup I created 3 years ago is now unreadable for a reason I have yet to determine. Lost a lot of important documentation. I have also considered purchasing an external drive, for the convenience...but I think with the flakiness of hardware, these days, I would entrust at least 2 separate backup methods.

Not a Dell...How are you planning to install it?

I would go w/an external usb 2 drive and unplug when not using. Size? They're cheap these days. Brand, I've used both Maxtor and western digital. Think they're the same now. Speed, get the most you can afford. Also look at warranty, try for 3 years. IMHO.

can i save my itunes stuff on these bad boys as well?

I'm not familiar enough with iTunes to know if you can direct it to store the library in a particular place. I bet it asks you on installation which folder you want to use. You could probably do it then.

yup!

awesome. now who is going to come to fenix and set this up for me?