Christine’s laptop has been creaking under the weight of our photos so some more storage was long overdue. I was tempted by a cheapo LaCie USB hard drive but the reviews reported a few too many disk failures for my liking. Instead went for a Western Digital My Book 250GB Essential. Plugged it in and it worked. Reformatted it as NTFS and it still works. Only time will tell how reliable it is.
Someone at Hursley was showing me a LaCie drive the other day that is apparently RAIDed – i.e. 2 drives in a single USB enclosure, 400Gb I think. That was on my “to buy” list. Currently I have a similar problem with photos… my strategy is to offload them off the tiny 40Gb drive in our home Thinkpad to the RAIDed storage on my home Linux workstation, which is fine… but that is done over wireless, which is slow when you are dealing with large RAW files. The other problem is that as far as I can tell, the database in Adobe Lightroom isn’t going to detect directory moves and retain settings regardless of where the files end up, although I could be wrong. So, a RAIDed external USB drive would be very useful.
This one looks funky, but I had an argument with WD a few years back and never intend(ed) to use them again. Also looks less than portable, but maybe that is OK. Seems like it has a reputation for noise and size though – all good from your perspective?
I was considering the Netgear SC101 Storage Central at one point but decided that, as I was going to burn everything to DVD and store remotely anyway (as the ultimate in backup if prone to human error!), it wasn’t money well spent. In an attempt to be vaguely green, I also couldn’t justify leaving NAS storage powered on the whole time (or a home server come to that).
The Western Digital is marginally larger than the drive it contains, mostly due to the ‘book’ styling, but otherwise seems fairly robust (although I’m not planning on carting it around). It does rumble a bit when sat on the desk but fortunately there are a few handy piles of paper lying around on Christine’s desk to provide sound insulation. The drive also turns itself off when the connected machine shuts and the big power button on the front makes it easy to also turn it off when not being used.