External Harddrive Help!

[Yield]

I am so frustrated. I need to get an external hard drive before I leave for Japan on Monday so that I don't have to buy a million new SD cards to store my photography on while I am there (I refuse to delete the pictures off of my current SD cards because I fear that my computer will crash and wipe AGAIN, making me lose all of my photography.. AGAIN.)

Now I am looking for a DESKTOP external harddrive for my LAPTOP (which acts like a Desktop- I never move it.) I don't want any programs because my Laptop cannot handle it.. it has 77 out of 290 GB left and any programs slows it down unbearably (I have a Seagate FreeAgent and it is absolutely terrible and slowed the laptop horribly.)

I'm looking for 1TB or 2TB... Every external harddrive I have seen has TERRIBLE reviews.. more bad than good. My mom has an old Seagate harddrive and it's wonderful. (Why are all the old HD's good and the new ones bad?)

ANYWAY. Which one do you think is best? I don't know which one to get.. and I really need one.

And remember, I live in America, so there's only specific ones I can buy, I suppose.

 

[TinysMom]

We buy all of our computer stuff (well - almost all) through NewEgg.com and we love it. I forget when you're leaving - I know it is soon.

Here are some links to products - I was looking for reviews that were at least 4 stars (circles/whatever) and had over 50 reviews. I didn't bother reading them all...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136469

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822204079

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822204069

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136471

I hope these help - there were five more pages of products but I'm way too tired to do more looking.

 

[Watermelons]

When you move large ammounts of "info" to a hard drive, it is generally slow, and it's usually the laptop not the external hardware like the harddrive.

I have a 500gb seagate free agent Its quick, easy, and loads fast for how much crap I stick onto it. It is no where near full and I've had it for a few years now, and I have a feeling you will never take as many pics as I have on that sucker lol. All these hard drives with 1 or 2 TB is just ... well youre going to be paying for space you wont end up filling up for another how many years.

Go onto your camera and change the size of the photos you take, Even photos past 2gb youre never going to print out a photo that large to need that kind of resolution. And the smaller the photo the less room it takes up on your card and hard drive. Even on my SLR the smallest size the camera allows, is still a very large photo, and just as clear as the largest size. Who needs to view a photo on a 10foot screen....

 

[pamnock]

I like my Seagate Maxtor . . .

 

[Yield]

Thank you Tinysmom, most of those were ones I were considering and another site's feedback is greatly appreciated.

@Watermelons: I didn't even move anything to the Seagate FreeAgent I have, I know that transferring files may move slowly. But I hooked this beast up, it installed some impossible program, and made my computer run as slow as the really old vaio computer my mom has downstairs. (and that is SLOW. I use sony vegas. I cannot have an external harddrive affecting my computer speed by just being plugged in.)

And I document everything with photographs, so don't assume I wouldn't take as many as you =P LOL I take almost 200 pictures in every photographing session I go on and I generally keep every one of them. I am currently looking at a 2TB Western Digital... better safe than sorry. It's real cheap too.

And I do not want to change my picture's file type or anything... I want them to be the best quality they can be. I want to be able to sell them one day. (plus JPEG is crap so if I screwed with it, it'd just look terrible.. *very picky about photographs*) I'm an aspiring photographer. My pictures are usually 3-4.50 MB anyways, not 2GB, that's a little excessive.. lol.. and all of them are 3872 x 2952.

@Pam: I love my mom's Seagate that she has but after the terrible program that my Seagate FreeAgent installed, I cannot trust them any longer... :[

 

[Watermelons]

Yield wrote:

And I document everything with photographs, so don't assume I wouldn't take as many as you =P LOL I take almost 200 pictures in every photographing session I go on and I generally keep every one of them. I am currently looking at a 2TB Western Digital... better safe than sorry. It's real cheap too.

And I do not want to change my picture's file type or anything... I want them to be the best quality they can be. I want to be able to sell them one day. (plus JPEG is crap so if I screwed with it, it'd just look terrible.. *very picky about photographs*) I'm an aspiring photographer. My pictures are usually 3-4.50 MB anyways, not 2GB, that's a little excessive.. lol.. and all of them are 3872 x 2952.

Haha see, i do a typical 400 on an small outing, and 200ish on a regular photo session with the critters. You may even find it cheaper in some cases to do multiple smaller hard drives vs 1 large one, plus what if something happens to your single 2tb HD? all your photos are toast, vs if you have 4 - 500gb HD's and something happened to 1, the pictures on your other 3 are still good. Same thing goes for memory cards, youre better off with multiple 2gb cards vs a single 8gb (god I give my friends grief for this)

Changing the photo size has nothing to do with changing its file type or quality, and when your camera is set to "small" you still get a very good size, high quality photo. Unless youre doing printslarger thenmy flat screen, you wont ever need the larger sizes the cameras offer, its just wasting valueable memory which is really just more room for more photos.

 

[NickZac]

Don't buy a packaged external hard drive. Making your own is the way to go, as you can make one which is far more reliable and fast, for a lot less. Get an aluminum Rosewill enclosure ($12), and a Western Digital Scorpio Black, which is a 7200 RPM Hard Disk Drive with a 5 year warranty. It is arguably the most reliable laptop hard disk drive (as in NOT a solid state drive [SSD]) on the market, and one of the fastest as well. It is as close as you can get to enterprise grade without the enterprise grade price. Why am I suggesting you get a Scorpio 2.5 inch as opposed to a desktop 3.5 inch drive? Because you will likely want to put the Scorpio in your laptop and put your laptop hard drive in your enclosure, as the Scorpio will be MUCH faster and far more reliable than the factory drive. And as said, NewEgg is the way to go.

I use this one
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...92&cm_re=scorpio_black-_-22-136-692-_-Product

inside of this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182138

Not the reviews. You now have a 500 GB 7200 RPM external performance hard drive for less than a pre-packaged 500 GB 'value' drive, such as the Passports that use a slower and less reliable hard drive, and a lesser quality enclosure. Also note that the Scorpio Black has a five year warranty vesus the (IIRC) one year of WD's 'boxed' externals.

 

[Yield]

I would not know how to work that or use it NickZac.. :[ I did not understand half of what you said to be honest...

 

[NickZac]

Essentially, as opposed to buying an external hard drive, you buy the external enclosure and the hard drive separately, place the hard drive inside the enclosure, and you are done. In laymen's terms, you can get much higher quality components for a lot less money by doing it this way. Mating the hard drive and enclosure takes literally 30 seconds, and you only need to do it once.