External Hard Drives

[damontucker]

I'm looking to transfer all my CD's on to an External Hard Drive.

Anyone have any good suggestions on how to go about this?

I have about 600 - 700 CD's.

[Glen Miyashiro]

Re: External Hard Drives

Are you talking about data CDs that you just want to copy onto a hard drive? 700 CDs, times 650 MB of data per CD, equals about 450 GB. That's a pretty big hard drive you're gonna need.

Or are you talking about music CDs that you plan to rip and store as mp3 files? Then you're looking at a lot less storage space, because mp3 files are compressed quite a bit. Figure about 50 MB of mp3 files per music CD, times 700 CDs, equals about 35 GB; much more manageable.

Or are you asking about the humbug logistics of how to load 700 CDs and rip them, one by one? Yeah, that's a lot of work. Good luck.

[Linkmeister]

Re: External Hard Drives

Or are you asking about the humbug logistics of how to load 700 CDs and rip them, one by one? Yeah, that's a lot of work. Good luck.

I did see a Circuit City ad for a 400-disc changer made by Sony.

[craigwatanabe]

Re: External Hard Drives

Probably cheaper to buy multiple hard drives and hard drive enclosures plus a USB hub and put all of your stuff on these drives.

I'm running a 4-port USB 2.0 powered hub by I-Rocks that I picked up from computergeeks.com for less than $10 (including shipping) and am running two 80gb Western Digital hard drives in Bytekk aluminum enclosures on it with no problems. From the USB hub it's just one USB connection to either my laptop or my desktop. In My Computer (Windows OS) it sees two drives.

Both drive enclosures run less then $20 (including shipping) each.

With two hard drives, the hub, two enclosures and shipping my total cost for 160gb of external hard drive storage ran less than $200.

[Glen Miyashiro]

Re: External Hard Drives

When does transfer speed become an issue (i.e. for what types of uses), and what types of connection are best?

I have been considering getting a network storage device to serve up video and music files on my home network, which runs on 10/100 Ethernet and 802.11g. What would the bottleneck be? I'm guessing it'd be the WiFi but I am not sure.

[helen]

Re: External Hard Drives

Isn't the speed of the WiFi around 50Mbps at the most? For wired Ethernet as long as all of the devices are at 100Mbps then of course the bottleneck would be the WiFi.

[Glen Miyashiro]

Re: External Hard Drives

Huh. But I guess the big question for me would be, is that fast enough to play my video files smoothly? So far it's been OK, stored on a wired PC's hard drive and being played on a WiFi notebook's screen. So I guess putting the files on a network drive would probably be about the same, then?

[helen]

Re: External Hard Drives

If the network drive is set to 100Mbps then yeah it should be no different. Another bottleneck that might come up is how many systems will be accessing that network drive. If it's just that one single system or a second system trying to access that network drive at the same time I don't think you will notice anything. I would suspect if 50 or more systems tried to access that network drive at the same time you will notice it for sure. I don't know if you start to notice it at 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 different systems at the same time. Then again it also depends on what or how much data they are trying to access from the network drive.

[tutusue]

Re: External Hard Drives

Just purchased an AcomoData 250GB external hard drive at CompUSA for $99. after a $35. rebate (yes, I'm religious with my rebating!). It came with both firewire and USB cables. Amazing! Now I just have to figure out how to partition it so that I can back up from 2 Mac OSs!!! They don't call me the Untechie Tutu for nuthin'!!!

[craigwatanabe]

Re: External Hard Drives

Just purchased an AcomoData 250GB external hard drive at CompUSA for $99. after a $35. rebate (yes, I'm religious with my rebating!). It came with both firewire and USB cables. Amazing! Now I just have to figure out how to partition it so that I can back up from 2 Mac OSs!!! They don't call me the Untechie Tutu for nuthin'!!!

Wow that's a good price (even if you gotta wait for the rebate check). The cheapest I've seen online runs about $115 with case and that's for an internal 250Gb Western Digital 7200 RPM drive and an external case. When you add shipping you're probably looking at close to $150. Heck for $99 it's worth it just for the drive unit. Are you sure it's not $199.00 ?

I've always wondered if you can run high Gb hard drives as external on older computers who's BIOS systems cannot recognize those capacities.

[kdramafan]

Re: External Hard Drives

I did see a Circuit City ad for a 400-disc changer made by Sony.

Amazon.com had a Sony one for about $300.

[speedtek]

Re: External Hard Drives

Hard drives die also so keep your backups! In my experience dont trust a hard drive!

[mel]

Re: External Hard Drives

I've owned many external hard drives over the years, most in the old SCSI interface for various Macs. Today I have 3 external firewire drives that I use with my Power Mac G4. For the longest of time I've had a 120GB LaCie external and it has been doing great duty for nearly 5 years now serving as backup drive to files that I save from the 2 internal drives I have on the G4.

Recently I bought 2 more external LaCies (Porsche design boxes) of 160 GB and 250 GB capacities. The 160 is for file storage of my photos and the 250 for my MP3 music. So far this is working great though I have to admit I plan to buy 2 more of these to use as backup as they get filled.

The thing about hard drives is that sooner or later they die and the bigger the drive the greater the chance for future catastrophe.

I am still archiving stuff to CD but with the issue of CD longevity in question I now am resigned to keeping archives on both large capacity hard drives and more CDs...

Sometimes I wonder when can we ever get a media device that can guarantee that our data will last forever?

[lurkah]

Re: External Hard Drives

Sometimes I wonder when can we ever get a media device that can guarantee that our data will last forever?

The honest question we also need to be asking ourselves is, who will even care about or appreciate all the personal stuff that we've spent so much time, trouble and money towards backing it all up, after we die? Or even if there was a catastrophic fire that destroyed it all, we'd just get to do it all over again.

I think the enjoyment we all receive is in the doing and in the experiencing of what we end up collecting and saving, and not necessarily in the actual archiving of the data itself.

Our kids will be too busy creating memories and saving stuff of their own.

When I'm old and feeble, I'd like to think that I'd still be able to appreciate whatever time I had left and spend it looking forward towards the future rather than looking backward at the past while rummaging through old and obsolete things such as external computer hard drives, etc., and if I ended up becoming senile (it's already started), nothing else would really matter anymore except the RAM that I had left in my brain.

Life is too short. Don't sweat the past, because there's nothing we can do about it. Enjoy today, which we can still determine and do something about.

[craigwatanabe]

Re: External Hard Drives

If you want your stuff to last forever, post it on the internet where everything is permanent it seems.

As for longevity, I still got 3-1/5" diskettes with my wedding guest list on it created with a Tandy Deskmate wordprocessor. I can't even open the file anymore but it's still intact!

When I worked at the Gas Company, we kept all information backed up in three separate physical locations AND a paper copy onsite. We ended up with so much paper backups that we had to lease out a storage center to keep all our records. I thought computers was supposed to eliminate paper.

It seems with the advent of personal computers and printers, we as a collective society are using much more paper than we ever did before the onset of computers.

In the 70's you could keep a quarter-reem of typing paper for over a year but now it seems you need several full reems of paper every year to satisify the typical printing demands. All that paper must have come from some trees somewhere.

I would use recycled paper but I heard that the amount of energy and resources needed to recycle a single sheet of paper is higher than if you were to simply cut down a tree, pulp it and create paper. Plus the chemicals needed to bleach out dyes and toners on recycled paper create more environmental issues than just making paper out of trees.