I have an I-Mac and considering an external hard drive for photo storage. Any suggestions?
G Brown
Loc: Sunny Bognor Regis West Sussex UK
Its a great idea....most suggest two that way come the revolution you may still have your photo's - the difficulty may be in getting a new computer.
I use the other side (PC) so can't help with what sort to buy..
have fun
I just increased my size from a 2TB Western Digital to a 4TB Seagate from Amazon for only $125. Cheap insurance. As a computer guy, I also have Carbonite and strongly suggest some sort of cloud storage also.
I have always used and recommended Western Digital. I'd start with a minimum of 1tb.
Never had any issues with failure.
pghend wrote:
I have an I-Mac and considering an external hard drive for photo storage. Any suggestions?
Depends on which IMAC you have and what type of connections (firewire 400, firewire 800, USB 2, usb 3 or thunderbolt).
Thunderbolt is the fastest and USB is the slowest. I have a late 2009 IMAC and I use Firewire 800 (thunderbolt is not available on this IMAC) as the connection to my two western digital's my book studio. I also use one drive as my Time machine backup drive. The performance is the best I can get with the IMAC setup I have. WWW.macsales.com has the best selections for MAC components. I upgrade the memory to 16 GB and also a 960 GB SSD from them early this year. You can private IM me if you need more information and help.
OWC has good deals on external drives. Buy one with several choices on connection, such as Thunderbolt + USB3 , maybe Firewire800 too. If one port fails you can switch to a different input source and still access the HD in the enclosure. OWC sells their own brand, also G Tech, LaCie and several other reputable makers. You'll want externally powered enclosures, with 3.5in Drives, 7,500RPM. 2 or 3 GB each- let the file size of your camera dictate your drive capacity.You'll also want one the same size or larger than the internal drive for a Time Machine back Up too. For every drive with data on it you wan at least one back up drive for that data.
All my personal data including photographs are kept on a Seagate 1tb portable hard drive which is my ' working ' drive. This, and my imac, are backed up to time machine on another 1tb seagate portable hard drive.
Nikon_DonB wrote:
I have always used and recommended Western Digital. I'd start with a minimum of 1tb.
Never had any issues with failure.
:thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup:
pghend wrote:
I have an I-Mac and considering an external hard drive for photo storage. Any suggestions?
I use two separate backups for my 2013 iMAC. I have an OWC miniSTACKmax for my Time Machine and a GDRIVE 2 HD in a RAID 1 setup for my photos. The miniSTACKmax is a USB2 connection but the GDRIVE is Thunderbolt and is quite fast.
pghend wrote:
I have an I-Mac and considering an external hard drive for photo storage. Any suggestions?
Are you the only computer in your residence or do you share your router and internet connection with others. If you do you might want to think about a network storage system such as synology has to offer (other brands as well). I went with four 3TB drives that when mirrored results in a little less than 6TB of actual storage. My fifth drive bay in the unit is a separate volume that i have a 6 TB drive in for time machine backups. The plus side of this is that everyone in the household can share files they want and not share files they don't want to but have some protection against failures of the drives. Single drives will eventually fail.
seroposi wrote:
All my personal data including photographs are kept on a Seagate 1tb portable hard drive which is my ' working ' drive. This, and my imac, are backed up to time machine on another 1tb seagate portable hard drive.
I'm using just 1 WD external drive as backup for the PC hard drive and still learning when I backup. My question is what is the differance between the 'working' drive and 'time machine' drive?
Tpharm wrote:
I'm using just 1 WD external drive as backup for the PC hard drive and still learning when I backup. My question is what is the differance between the 'working' drive and 'time machine' drive?
Your backup drive is the same as the time machine drive on the macs.. You are probably (i am guessing here) using your hard drive on your computer as your working drive where you keep all your files and then use your backup drive for a backup of your working drive. Time Machine is what Apple calls its automatic backup software (for lack of a better term)
happy sailor wrote:
Your backup drive is the same as the time machine drive on the macs.. You are probably (i am guessing here) using your hard drive on your computer as your working drive where you keep all your files and then use your backup drive for a backup of your working drive. Time Machine is what Apple calls its automatic backup software (for lack of a better term)
Yes you are right. Thank you for the info.
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