Maxtor 250 GB External hard drive

[Phil Hall]

FedX just delivered a new drive. My systems are plugging up with photos. I save files to CD and DVD plus I also have 120 and 160 Gb external hard drives.
the first thing I noticed is that with the Firewire cable it took 44 minutes to copy 38.5 GB of RAW and JPG files, the USB2.0 cable took 29 minutes for the same set of files.

My main machine in California is an ABS with 2 SATA 160 Gb hard drives. We spend part of our time in Hawaii where I have an HP Pavilion 3.0 MHz with 160 GB drive, CD and DVD. I also use a Toshiba Satellite Pro laptop.
I am going to use IMatch to keep track of photos. I have been using Filemaker Pro to keep track of CDs and DVD's.

Phil Hall

[kawter2]

I tend to not prefer removable drives. Just when you depend on them they will fail. The #1 cause od HDD falure is wear from bumping etc. I like SATA raid 5 ummm yummy

[metsuyan]

I have to say... The Maxtor 250g external harddrive (onetouch) is a great hd. Never had any major problems with them and I've had them for over 2 years now.


That having been said, if you noticed I said "them". I have 4 x Maxtor 250g external hard drives (in addition to interal drives). As good as they've been, I don't trust any single hd to hold all of my important documents, whatever they be.

If you've accumulated a mass of files/photos that are dear/important to you, and you can't afford to lose them, I would recommend you back up your files to at least 2 other methods and if possible keep one set in a different location.

I know it sounds nuts, but with all the gr8 things to be said about the digital revolution, the fact is that there's no such thing as negatives anymore and all of your memories/hard work can be lost in the blink of an eye.

Food for thought.

Best of luck.

PS. Re: speed. I wonder if you are using a USB or Firewire hub with other USB or Firewire peripherals. That would be one possible reason to explain the noticeably different write speeds. For true speed, try getting on board with SCSI drives. They rock.

[Citizensmith]

I just dump everything to DVD. 360Gb of internal HDD but most of that is taken up by movies. I back my photo folders up regularly to duplicate DVDs, easy enough to access and saves messing around with an assload of hard drives. Oh yeah, and I use a beaten up ancient (relatively) dell latitude with a 20Gb drive as field storage.

[tim]

What will you do in 5 years when you can't read data from any of the DVDs?

[caesars0331]

What will you do in 5 years when you can't read data from any of the DVDs?


Please elaborate!

[kawter2]

Please elaborate!


Shelf life of a CD/DVD is 15 years at best

[Avalonthas]

I always go with internal HDD's simply because there cheaper. Then i can save up for some ink :P