Portable Hard Drive help

panzertroop

panzertroop

Joined
Aug 8, 2008
Messages
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I need a portable hard drive to store my photo images and use them between multiple machines; including a Mac book Pro, HP tower etc. Oh yeah it needs to be affordable!

Any ideas?
 
Almost anything with usb connection will work... you just need to format it to FAT32. Plenty of 1 to 2 Tb drives out there for around $100. Just keep in mind that like any hard drive, it could fail.
 
Consider buying a hard drive enclosure. Then you use your standard model/brand hard drive (whatever's your favorite). That seems like the most reliable, cost-affective, and flexible option.

I use a Rosewill enclosure and a standard Seagate hard drive.
 
Or check out a wifi networked hard drive. You'll pay a little more but if you just need it in the home its definitely more convenient.
 
I second the enclosure, especially if you have an old HD handy. My wife's old laptop died, but the HD was fine... An enclosure cost me like 10 bucks from Amazon and now I have a handy and quite small 250 gig storage unit....
 
I agree with getting any of the new 1-2 Tb portable drives now available for under $100. They are very useful and fast as back-ups and to store files. 'mazon.com sells them and ships for free.

Brands are not that important nowadays as long as you stick with the basic well-known brands. Get one with USB 3.0 version data transfer rates. Because these are powered thru the USB connector, you do not need a separate power supply & cable.

Pulling & using existing HDs is fine (I do it), but if you are shopping for new, get the new form factor portable HDs.

externalharddrive.jpg
 
I've had good luck with a Seagate FreeAgent and Iomego eGo BlackBelt (cute name, but tough as nails).

Use to back up with DVD's but so much easier with a USB external.

At the current prices buying two is really not that much and gives double the protection to valuable data. Valuable is relative, but to me its any file(s) that I really need or have put a lot of time into.
Unless your have a huge amount of data or are storing multiple full backups or drive images, you can likely get buy with 500GB nicely. My Iomega is 500GB and has a dozen sequential full copies of my data files with room to spare.

Personally, I'd wouldn't use the backup software they usually come with. Then you don't need to find that software to get to your files.
IMHO, its too much trouble for specific file recovery and in all my years I've only done one full restore of a system, and that was with a drive image program (like Acronis TrueImage or Norton Ghost) from my network server to the desktop machine I'd trashed.
I always doubted the likelihood of a full restore from basic backup software actually working.

For that matter I usually avoid their install programs. Just plug it into the USB port and use it like any other drive.
I use SyncToy to copy files, which is fairly simple and free from Microsoft. Once set up, a couple of clicks and all the folders you have specified are copied.
 
The little "home servers" and "media servers" are really nice. On a wireless (or wired) network, they store files, movies, do backups, etc. for everything on the network.

That saves you when a computer dies since all the data is being backed up on a redundant set of hard drive.
 
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