External Hard Drive

I've never used an external hard drive for my photos and have always just stored them on my built in hard drive. Is 1TB a good enough size for someone who is just getting into photography?

Depends on how many photos you take and store.

For some people 1tb might be a years worth of photos for others it's might be less then a year and other still it might be more then a year.

How big is your internal hard drive and how much of it do your photos taking up?

You say you're just getting into photography, so how big are the files from your camera? RAW or jpeg? Divide file size by hard drive size and that will give you a rough estimate of how many photos you can store on it.

Get two. One for your files and one to backup your files. A high quality RAW file is about 25MB. Don't be afraid to delete the poor quality photos. Most people's "keeper rate" is less than 10%, I'm guessing. Depends what you shoot though.

^ Agree.

Some are of the philosophy to never delete a photo they shoot. More power to 'em I guess. I have an ichy tringer finger and can shoot several hundred of my kids in a day at he park, and 1,500+ at a wedding just as second shooter. It doesn't take that much more time when scrolling through the collection to mark the keepers, the maybes, and the definite junkers/redudant shots.

After I import to Lightroom I scroll through with my right hand on the left and right arrow keys, and my left hand fingers on 1-4 for stars. I rate junkers as "1", really good ones as "4" or "5," Ok's as "3"s and usually don't use 2. When I'm done going through I'll do a filter to display all the =1 star, and delete 'em. Then go back through the "3s" as necessary to weed a few more out.

1tb in today's standards isn't that big especially with the larger mpx camera's.

I don't recommend buying those usb powered external drives like WD passports etc. If your going to the extent of buying an external drive please spend decent coin for reliability.

I'd purchase at least a 2tb bare minimum. Cost wise it's not double to a 1tb drive. 2tb is a decent size for a heavy shooter and will last a long time for a casual shooter.

If you do your research you'll find that Seagate consumer grade drives are one of the most unreliable drives on the market. For a standalone external I'd look at a WD black drive (blue drive if you want to save some money) or a hitachi "HGST" drive. Black drive is rated very good for reliability and the HGST has stats that is extremely impressive even when you compare to a business enterprise grade HDD.

do your research.......

i say select your reliable hard drive and buy an your own external enclosure or docking station.

FWIW...

I've had good luck with WD Red drives. They're designed for NAS use, although I've been remarkably lucky with drive failures so far. You may hear about RAID. RAID is nice, but not a backup. Mirrored drives do you no good if lightning takes out both.

Having a NAS, IMO, is hugely useful these days. Don't have to worry about where in the house it is, just connect anywhere, even if you're on the road.

Some very useful information from above posts. I'll need to take note myself and invest in one of more reliable drives as mentioned.

For the OP, if you haven't already got a backup plan, please take the consideration to adapt some form of backup process in case of HDD failure. I myself have learned it the hard way and lost over 500GB of photos due to external HDD failure and lack of backup. Nearly lost it again a few days ago but managed to recover most of them as I've got duplicates here and there. Nothing more heartbreaking than losing those priceless family photos...

As for size, I'm not a heavy shooter and have been keeping archive from 2009 and they all seem to fit nicely in 2TB drive. I'll probably need to increase the size down the track but for someone starting out, 2TB should be plenty. And get two of them!

My contribution to this forum is based on personal experience and also based on my friends in the computer resale world.

I look at RMA (return merchandise authorization) numbers as some form of grading system. This is why I'd never buy Seagate barracuda or any consumer grade seagate drives. I also wouldn't touch a Western digital "my book" since it uses really unreliable green drives.

Keep life simple and backup a backup with two different drives. WD black drives are probably one of the "safer" drives to buy. NO guarantees in life so be realistic about "backups" Sh!! happens and just do the best you can. HGST is rated extremely high in the reliability department. For simplistic brainless backup I suggest buying a mediasonic docking station and buy a 3.5" WD 2tb Black drive. Stick it in like an old 80's gaming console!! LOL!! throw all your photos on that hard drive. After your done....repeat with the other drive. Fool proof and redundancy!!

Just recently I spent over $1300 bucks on a Qnap NAS with 3x 6tb WD Red hdd. WD red's lack any substantial error correction so that is why they are meant for NAS systems since the NAS software does this as a function. I also use a CyberPower 1500PFCLCD pure sinewave power surge battery backup for any brown/black out power outages. I consider a NAS as a form of backup but not fool proof like the docking station method.

I use my NAS as my own personal cloud but to be honest I like using dropbox for quick file transfers.

You can also buy a good quality hard drive enclosure. I like my Startech.Com 3.5In Superspeed Usb 3.0 Sata Hard Drive Enclosure With Fan SAT3510BU3. Decent quality but better than a WD "my book" enclosure. I put in a WD black 2tb HDD. I turn off the backup when I am not using it. At least you have the knowledge that your using a high quality drive.

To sum things up.... try not to buy pre packaged "convenient" drive enclosures because they will very likely be cheap consumer grade HDD( typically found cheap for a reason) Casual purposes use those USB driven hard drives like WD passports etc but not for crucial backup. Hard drives are cheap but losing priceless photos will cost you dearly. Redundancy is the key. Having a "ooooh ahhhh" 4tb external WD "my book" sounds impressive but I'd take a $30 USB Mediasonic docking station and a WD 2tb black drive any day.

If you live in the US.......you have no excuse LOL!!!! stuff is dirt cheap compared to other parts of the world for example the average price for a 2tb black HDD is $180CDN while you can buy the same drive on amazon.com for $127 USD!!!! No excuse for not buying redundancy!!

^ I will say that I have never had a WD My Passport fail.
While they do offer higher quality drives, I am quite happy with my pair of drives.
Portability is important to me, for me NAS is not required.
I could not agree more. Dirt cheap prices in USA.
Here in Japan the 2Tb is $180.
While in the US the 3Tb is $120
And the desktop drives offer even more space for the same price.

InfiniteDivide wrote in post #17871774
^ I will say that I have never had a WD My Passport fail.
While they do offer higher quality drives, I am quite happy with my pair of drives.
Portability is important to me, for me NAS is not required.
I could not agree more. Dirt cheap prices in USA.
Here in Japan the 2Tb is $180.
While in the US the 3Tb is $120
And the desktop drives offer even more space for the same price.

Good to hear you have never had issues. I own WD Passports (2x 1tb). I've use them more of no critical portability device. If I ever had to backup during an event I'd trust a pair of USB3 64gb or 128gb memorystick more than a mechanically spinning "passport". Possibly i have many friends losing files due to Passport usb drive failing. If you think about it your using a drive that is more likely to get bumped in transit and less robust simply due to size.

In most cases a NAS is not a need to have as it's more of a "want". I like it because once you go through the efforts of setting one up you just forget about it and use it as a media device and personal cloud. I know a friend that is so hardcore that he uses a NAS to backup another NAS LOL!!! crazy redundancy!!!

So looking at prices my WD Red 6tb (for my nas drive) is $349 cdn and the same exact drive in the US at the moment is $249!!! There is absolutely no reason for anyone in the US not to have a killer personal backup system

AlanU wrote in post #17871896
Good to hear you have never had issues. I own WD Passports (2x 1tb). I've use them more of no critical portability device. If I ever had to backup during an event I'd trust a pair of USB3 64gb or 128gb memorystick more than a mechanically spinning "passport". Possibly i have many friends losing files due to Passport usb drive failing. If you think about it your using a drive that is more likely to get bumped in transit and less robust simply due to size.

The alternative is an SSD in a USB drive enclosure, so you have the robustness of solid state memory, and the faster-than-SD speed of USB 3.0 (even the slower USB 2 is faster than SD! https://photography-on-the.net …read.php?t=1450​809&page=2 )

in comparison, using internet to get to the NAS from outside, while in the field, might subject you to slow internet connection, like 2 Megabit/sec.

Wilt wrote in post #17871962
The alternative is an SSD in a USB drive enclosure, so you have the robustness of solid state memory, and the faster-than-SD speed of USB 3.0 (even the slower USB 2 is faster than SD! https://photography-on-the.net …read.php?t=1450​809&page=2 )

in comparison, using internet to get to the NAS from outside, while in the field, might subject you to slow internet connection, like 2 Megabit/sec.

I think this is an excellent suggestion and one I'd like to explore some day. The issue though is that large SSD's are still quite pricey compared to their much cheaper and larger "spinning" brothers. I have no doubt pricing will come down eventually.

I remember when a 1GB SCSI hard drive went for around $1000 back in the late '90's. Now look at what $1k will buy!

sapearl wrote in post #17871978
I think this is an excellent suggestion and one I'd like to explore some day. The issue though is that large SSD's are still quite pricey compared to their much cheaper and larger "spinning" brothers. I have no doubt pricing will come down eventually.

I remember when a 1GB SCSI hard drive went for around $1000 back in the late '90's. Now look at what $1k will buy!

If the point is a mechanically robust backup device while travelling about from one location to another, until you can xfer all the data to a spinning drive back in your home/office, even the somewhat limited space of an affordable 512GB SSD is more than enough! Good enough for >10000 RAW images from the 5D3, do you exceed that number in a day or week?!

BTW, back in the Dark Ages when HD were being first introduced to PCs, I became a dealer for a HD company for a while, just so I could spend 'only $250' (rather than retail price $500) to install a 5 MegaByte harddrive in my own IBM PC !

I tend to only use Intel or Samsung ssd drives for reliability.

Wilt wrote in post #17871982
............BTW, back in the Dark Ages when HD were being first introduced to PCs, I became a dealer for a HD company for a while, just so I could spend 'only $250' (rather than retail price $500) to install a 5 MegaByte harddrive in my own IBM PC !

Ha! Then you probably remember the old Winchesters too then