External HD for editing photos

[arondee]

I do most of my photo editing in Lightroom 2 and CS3 on my laptop. It's a little slow at times but it gets the job done. I shoot with a 50d and my files sizes are around 20mb for a single raw file and I am completely out of space on my 140gb hard disk. I'd like to move all my pictures to an external hard drive and edit the pics from there but I'm afraid it's going to be even slower than it is now. Because I bring my laptop everywhere with me I would prefer to have an external HD that is powered through USB or firewire (if that's even possible). My question is this. Do any of you have any experience editing pics on an external USB powered HD? If it works ok for you, do you have any suggestions on what drive to use?

[bohdank]

External drives/enclosures are pretty much all the same, imo.

On a seperate note.... I would not trust all my images to only 1 copy (1 drive). All hard drives fail, eventually.

[arondee]

I actually have all my pics backed up on 2 other hard drives at all times. Have you done any picture editing on an external HD through USB?

[bohdank]

No... I edit on internal drive (2 x 1gig, RAID1) and back up once a week to external and when I come back with new images. I now have an ESATA dock but I still only use it for backups.

I used to have external USB drives but, like now, only for backup. Not because it was slow(er) but because that is the way I set up my data and backup. 20 meg files are not that large.... USB will be slower than an internal drive but it should be acceptable, I think. We all have different tolerance levels.

PS: what/how do you back up to the other drives ? Are they external or do you have a desktop and use the laptop for when you travel ?

[arondee]

I've got a media center PC that's connected to my TV that I backup to wirelessly from my laptop, then I have an external HD that uses AC power that the Media Center backs up to on a schedule. Works pretty well although I have to admit the wireless backup is slow :)

[KCMO Al]

I have my files in 3 places, laptop (500Gb), external WD Mybook (250Gb) connected to my desktop, and an external WD portable (320Gb). I don't know where the OP is located but Best Buy in the
States will have tons of the portable drives. They're up to 1Tb (maybe more) at very reasonable prices. The portables are powered by the USB port and are (to me) fast enough.

[fibrepunk]

External drives/enclosures are pretty much all the same, imo.

On a seperate note.... I would not trust all my images to only 1 copy (1 drive). All hard drives fail, eventually.

Not all external drives/enclosures are the same. Try looking for enclosures with the capabilities to connect through using Ethernet connection to the network instead of using USB. When you have mapped the device to your computer, you will noticed an improvement in data transfer between the device and your computer.

[bohdank]

I was referencing only directly connected external drives, which the OP is looking for. My mistake for not spelling it out/
As far as networks... I would bet most people are using wireless between their main PC and hub. That isn't going to be very fast, imo, but I have never connected a network drive to my hub.

[arondee]

Well thanks everyone for the input. I decided to go with a Seagate Go 640GB. They had them on Sale at BB for like $109 which was cheaper than Amazon. It seems to work really well, when you load lightroom and PS the images get loaded into memory anyway. I didn't notice any difference in lag time loading the images to edit but writing a large tiff from Photoshop back to the HD was maybe just a touch slower but not significant.

[professorman]

Well thanks everyone for the input. I decided to go with a Seagate Go 640GB. They had them on Sale at BB for like $109 which was cheaper than Amazon. It seems to work really well, when you load lightroom and PS the images get loaded into memory anyway. I didn't notice any difference in lag time loading the images to edit but writing a large tiff from Photoshop back to the HD was maybe just a touch slower but not significant.

I have a docking station for my HP laptop. XB3000 (http://www.amazon.com/HP-XB3000-Port-Replicator/dp/B000FVZC66). I then connect a external monitor, and 2x 1.5TB desktop size hard drives to it. I put my new work on my laptop, but my old work, I convert to DNG and store them on the external. One external is a mirror of the other. Everything in my user folder on my laptop also gets backed up to HD 1, and again, mirrored to HD2.