External Hard Drives

Hello!!!

Just getting my feet wet in photography and have a few questions...

1. With External Hard Drives......opposed to the Seagate and WD hard drives and such..are there hard drives you can use for storage that there is a base that has the motor...and you plug in the storage unit part ...download your items...then pull out the storage unit that is separate from the base....I'm not sure how to explain what I am thinking....I have had several EHD go bad and found it so costly...so I was thinking if you plug in a piece that actually stores the data but it is separate from the motor...then if the motor goes bad then you can simply buy another motor but the data drive is untouched.....

Sorry, that was long but wasn't sure how to phrase it.......

and 2. Can I load my Photoshop and Lightroom program onto an EHD for use...or does it actually have to be loaded onto my computers hard drive.....

Thank you for any help provided!

1. No.

2. Maybe, depends a lot on your system, but results may be slow as compared to hard drive. Recommend SSD in that respect. Nothing else comes close to the performance boost of an SSD.

It sounds like you are hard on drives. Try treating them with more care. I have three external drives, one almost nine years old. But none are "tossed" around. They are carefully placed in my backpack. When they are in use, they are "placed" on a table. I have seen people remove drives from a bag and literally toss them on a hard surface.

Many times, the so-called 'external hard drives' which you buy with Western Digital, Seagate, etc. name brands on them actually contain inferior support electronics (the USB interface itself or the power supply fails) yet the actually storage unit is perfectly fine! In such cases, if you break into the enclosure and extract the harddrive, you can put the harddrive into a 'USB docking station' like these...

http://www.amazon.com …fRID=0268QKMNE5​8C8X1X1TPA

http://www.amazon.com …ds=harddrive+do​ck+station

...and get access to all the data stored in the supposedly bad external hard drive. Just because it has a recognized quality harddrive within the enclosure is no guarantee that the same manufacturer puts quality electronics into the external enclosure, which serves only the purpose of increasing their harddrive sales volume for them! I had to use a hacksaw to sufficiently break open a WD enclosure which had failed, and inserting the WD harddrive into a USB docking unit got me access to all the data.

Such docking stations are also usable in place of the permanent external enclosures associated with most 'external hard drive'. So you could insert Harddrive X to make a Windows 7 system image, insert Harddrive Y whenenever you do postprocessing on photo files, insert Harddrive Z when you wish to duplicate important files for data insurance, using one docking unit.

I use an external USB3 enclosure very similar to the one that Wilt linked to. This works out great for me, because I had two extra 2TB Hitachi drives (after putting a raid 5 4x4TB array in my system). These disks are known for being the most reliable HDD's made. I don't need a portable drive to stick in my laptop bag, what I needed was something I could grab in case my house was on fire. Since I've got two drives, every couple of weeks or so I rotate out the drive, and keep one in my safe deposit box and one at home. I use a program called FreeFileSync (an older version since it looks like the newest version has some annoyances with it) and have a couple of batch jobs setup that just copy over all my documents, my picture library, and other important data. This keeps both drives relatively up to date, and one safe even if my house goes up, or is robbed, while I'm not here.

In 2005 I lost all of my early digital photos. It will not happen again.

--
Richard Maynard

+1 to what Wilt said.

I use bare drives and hard drive docks made by Plugable from Amazon. I've found the ones with ASMedia chips to have the best compatibility with USB3.0 and Macs.

You can keep your photos themselves on an EHD but generally you'll want your catalog and image previews on your boot HDD for speed purposes.

I do not work on my internal hard drive, i have 4 external hard drive always plugged to my desktop (iMac), Lightroom library are also on the external HD, it work as fast as if it was on my internal hard drive,
I can change computers any time without being worried, i just plug the external hard drive to a new computer if needed and i can go ahead and continue to work where i left

Thank you everyone......great information!!!!! Thank you....off to check out those links!!!!!

If you're on the go, consider something like this:
http://www.amazon.com …0100-silver/dp/B004KLYCLI
Thats without the drives, a bit more costly, but something I'm considering being I travel with my working files.

I put one of these in all the computers I build for myself and family:

IMAGE LINK: http://amzn.com/B0058Y​XZPA

The last case I purchased is a Corsair Obsidian 650D which has a built-in dock for an SSD or HD: http://www.corsair.com​/en/obsidian-series-650d . I just have to slide a drawer open then pop in a bare drive.

Not all external HDs are the same in terms of quality. If you want the highest reliability, buy an "enterprise" or "NAS" (Network Attach Station) drive. These type of drives have gone thru more rigorous testing, and have a longer Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF). They also may cost twice as much as the "consumer" (cheap) HDs. But if reliability is your passion, spend the extra $$$. But ... still even the best HDs can fail, so you should have a backup or two (yet even more HDs).

If you buy any magnetic drives, the motor always comes with it and they are married for life. The motor, electronics, read/write head intimately work together as one system. It can't be broken up.

chantu wrote in post #17594604
Not all external HDs are the same in terms of quality. If you want the highest reliability, buy an "enterprise" or "NAS" (Network Attach Station) drive. These type of drives have gone thru more rigorous testing, and have a longer Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF). They also may cost twice as much as the "consumer" (cheap) HDs. But if reliability is your passion, spend the extra $$$. But ... still even the best HDs can fail, so you should have a backup or two (yet even more HDs).

If you buy any magnetic drives, the motor always comes with it and they are married for life. The motor, electronics, read/write head intimately work together as one system. It can't be broken up.

That is the conventional 'wisdom'. And then you have the real world experiences of cloud server companies like Backblaze.
They discovered that"

"The assumption that “enterprise” drives would work better than “consumer” drives has not been true in our tests. I analyzed both of these types of drives in our system and found that their failure rates in our environment were very similar — with the “consumer” drives actually being slightly more reliable."

Their experience currently is with almost 40000 harddrive units! They summarize, "most of the consumer-grade drives in the Backblaze data center are continuing to perform well, and are a cost-effective way to provide unlimited online backup at a good price."

Wilt wrote in post #17594687
That is the conventional 'wisdom'. And then you have the real world experiences of cloud server companies like Backblaze.
They discovered that"

"The assumption that “enterprise” drives would work better than “consumer” drives has not been true in our tests. I analyzed both of these types of drives in our system and found that their failure rates in our environment were very similar — with the “consumer” drives actually being slightly more reliable."

Their experience currently is with almost 40000 harddrive units! They summarize, "most of the consumer-grade drives in the Backblaze data center are continuing to perform well, and are a cost-effective way to provide unlimited online backup at a good price."

Enterprise drives carry longer warranty's; hence the higher costs to guarantee the longer MTBF. If Backblaze wants to cut corners to save a few dollars, so be it. I'm not sure if one would want to keep mission-critical data on a disk drive screaming along 24/7.

That being said, the enterprise HD could fail tomorrow, and the consumer-grade could last for years on end. It's your data to "roll the dice"

chantu wrote in post #17594720
I'm not sure if one would want to keep mission-critical data on a disk drive screaming along 24/7.

They go to sleep when not in use.