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Mississippi | SORRY...I meant for this to be part of a thread (below) about external hard drives. I'm still learning the system...
My wife is a photographer (she specializes in ag) and has had to deal with all kinds of external drives.
She's been trying to set up a new data base to catalog 4 years worth of digital images, and a guru who lectures on digital asset management (DAM, they call it) recommended SATA (Serial ATA) drives because of their speed.
You can get internal or external SATA drives. Unless you've got a really new computer, it probably doesn't have a SATA interface card, but it's pretty simple to install one, either for internal or external drives.
The advantage is that they are much faster, as I understand it. They don't spin faster, but they do communicate with the computer faster. She's seen an immediate difference with 2 500-meg SATA drives she bought to start building the catalog on. My wife writes to one, then copies from that one to the other one. She has been doing this with USB drives for some time, and she says there is a marked difference.
She bought Maxtor, partly because the guru was so high on them and partly because she had never had one to fail, herself, although any hard drive will eventually fail. Debra has maybe 3 terabytes of images stored, counting duplicates of images, and there are a bunch of drives on her desk, so she's seen her share of failures. As she can, Debra will replace her USB drives with SATA drives.
With any external drive, the fan is an important feature to keep 'em cool. There are drives out there that don't have fans. Stay away from them. One particular brand of external drives several years ago had very slick case designs but no fan, and there were all kinds of failure complaints on photographer forums. You can put up with a little fan noise, knowing the drive isn't overheating.
Photographers deep into digital photography always have data backed up on twin drives, plus on CDs or DVDs. If I were storing precision ag data, I would probably do the same thing. As several people have noted in this thread, external drives have gotten much cheaper. As also noted, external drives allow you to take data with you in an emergency. We also use an online backup service (backup.com) to automatically upload our accounting and data base files to off-site servers. It costs about $100 a year for a minimum amount of storage, but it ensures that the core of our business records are on monitored servers in bunkers in different parts of the country. Call me paranoid, if you like.
Edited by Owen Taylor 3/4/2007 21:43
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Consider SATA drives
