Have you noticed the latest computer "accessory" to hit the mass market? I'm talking about mass storage devices - external hard drives with humongous storage numbers like 500 gigabytes for $130 or even a terabyte for $250. These are drives that only network engineers would have thought about just a couple of years ago and now you see them at Costco, Sam's and Target. What is going on?
Well, for one thing, digital photography has really hit big. I'm not even sure where to get film developed any more. And with digital photography we take 20 pictures or more where before we would have taken 1 with film. Digital cameras are increasing in pixel range so that a 5 megapixel camera was top of the line for professional photographers 5 years ago and is now commonplace for pocket cameras. My hopelessly outdated, 2-year old 5 mega-pixel pocket digital camera takes pictures roughly in the range of 1 megabyte. I take approximately 150 pictures per month so my storage needs for pictures alone increase at the rate of 150 MB per month of 1.8 gigbytes per year. I don't know if my audio needs will increase at that rate but just converting all the CDs we had took up slightly more storage than all our photos to date.
People who Photoshop or develop scrapbooks on the computer can easily increase their photo usages by a factor of 10 because each picture will exist in several different sizes as well as be included in more than one project.
Has anyone out there had experience with this external hard drives? What has been your experience? Good or bad? Do you use the hard drive for "mirroring" your active drive or for making periodic backups? Which software have you used? And your opinion of that software would be??
We use one in the lab. Smaller size, only a few hundred gigabytes though. I picked it up so that we could back up the last ten years of expedition photos. Before that pictures were standard film. We even have many in slide form. Maybe I'll have to borrow your slide scanner sometime.
ReplyDeleteI don't know about good mirroring programs, but if you find any please tell me. I'm terrible about backing up.
ReplyDeleteOn a slightly different note, does anyone really know why people keep buying more and more megapixels. At about 3 feet 2 megapixels is about as detailed as the human eye can see in an 8x10 picture. A 600x800 screen is only about half a megapixel, and high-resolution TV's are only about 2 megapixels. Unless you are making poster size prints, or cropping in on small areas of your photo, the extra megapixels just fill up your drive faster.
I realize storage space is getting cheaper all the time, and you may actually crop and print, but it amazes me how many people store hundreds or thousands of 5 megapixel photos but only ever view them on a 1/2 megapixel device.