External Hard Drive: Are any of you using a external HD for your photos? If so which one and how many TBs?

warrior Loc: Paso Robles CA

Are any of you using a external HD for your photos? If so which one and how many TBs?

jimvanells Loc: Augusta, GA

I use two 2-terabyte hard drives, both of which are USB 3.0. If you have an older computer that does not support USB 3, you may be able to add it to your existing mother board. USB 3.0 is 10x faster than USB 2 so the increased speed is well worth the effort.

joer Loc: Colorado/Illinois

warrior wrote:

Are any of you using a external HD for your photos? If so which one and how many TBs?

I currently use a Passport 2TB external drive for back up. It was cheap and so far no issues.

You may want to go larger depending on the number and size of the images.

My regular internal drives are (2) SSDs.

Ramled Loc: Victoria, British Columbia

warrior wrote:

Are any of you using a external HD for your photos? If so which one and how many TBs?

I use WD(Western Digital) My Passport 1 TB drives and also LaCie for my photos and have not had issues with any of them. I back up my photos on more than one external hard drive. I use Mac and shoot in Raw.

romanticf16 Loc: Commerce Twp, MI

warrior wrote:

Are any of you using a external HD for your photos? If so which one and how many TBs?

When you pose a Q please state whether you are on a Mac or Win platform and what OS you are running. It lets us know what to recommend. For a Mac I'd recommend a Thunderboldt external enclosure or raid with 3 or 4TB 7200RPM drives. For Win it'd be a USB3 or SATA enclosure. The # and size of drives would also have to consider whether you shoot in RAW, Camera file size, and how many images you create per year.

RWR Loc: La Mesa, CA

warrior wrote:

Are any of you using a external HD for your photos? If so which one and how many TBs?

I'm using 2 Western Digital Elements 3 TB external drives. Over a year on one, about 5 months on the other. No issues so far, even with Windows 10. They're compatible with Macs also (require reformatting). They're presently $94 at B&H.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/983303-REG/western_digital_wdbwlg0030hbk_nesn_3tb_elements_desktop_external.html

markngolf Loc: Bridgewater, NJ

Hi,

I have an internal drive dedicated to photos, another internal dedicated to other data (documents, music,...) I also have a solid state drive dedicated to my Win 10 OS. I have 2, 3 TB Fantom externals for backup. Then I do an additional backup of my 3 internals to the cloud using Acronis software.

The 3 Fantom externals are reliable, efficient and quiet. USB 3.0

Good luck Warrior
Mark

warrior wrote:

Are any of you using a external HD for your photos? If so which one and how many TBs?

Keldon Loc: Yukon, B.C.

I have a small, 1 TB Lacie that fits into a side pocket of my camera bag that I download onto when travelling. Once home again, I download everything onto 2-2 TB Western Digitals. I have another 4 TB WD that acts as a backup that gets dumped to automatically every Sunday night. Never an issue with any of them.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

warrior wrote:

Are any of you using a external HD for your photos? If so which one and how many TBs?

WD black in a fan vented enclosure - 1 and 2 TB - the drives are guaranteed for 5 yrs. There is no benefit to getting a consumer solution that will fail sooner than later. Buying a case and a drive will add about 35% to the price of a low-cost equivalent, but it is faster, more rugged and is expected to last at least as long as it's warranty. That goes for LaCie, which populates their drive cases with cheap Seagate drives.

WD Black and Re, or Hitachi, are the most reliable bare drives to get. I use a fan vented cabinet because I am old school and believe that heat can shorten the life of a drive. Apparently with the newer drives this may not be the case any longer. You can always populate a 2.5" case with an SSD and call it a day - doesn't get any more rugged than those. BTW, installing a drive is a 3 minute operation if you've never done one, and a 90 sec operation the second time you do one. Any of these are preferable to the off-the-shelf prepackaged solutions.

colo43 Loc: Eastern Plains of Colorado

I use Seagate 2TB
USB 3.0

ecobin Loc: Paoli, PA

I use WD 4TB as the main storage after I finish editing in CS6. I use another external drive as a backup using Time Machine. It's a usb3 but my 2010 iMac only has usb2, so the transfer isn't as fast as I would like. Will need to upgrade the iMac next year.

jethro779 Loc: Tucson, AZ

ecobin wrote:

I use WD 4TB as the main storage after I finish editing in CS6. I use another external drive as a backup using Time Machine. It's a usb3 but my 2010 iMac only has usb2, so the transfer isn't as fast as I would like. Will need to upgrade the iMac next year.

Why not get the Thunderbolt to USB 3 converter.

http://www.amazon.com/Kanex-KTU10-Thunderbolt-eSATA-Adapter/dp/B00LOLBBQQ%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q%26tag%3Dduckduckgo-osx-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3DB00LOLBBQQ

ecobin Loc: Paoli, PA

jethro779 wrote:

Why not get the Thunderbolt to USB 3 converter.

http://www.amazon.com/Kanex-KTU10-Thunderbolt-eSATA-Adapter/dp/B00LOLBBQQ%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q%26tag%3Dduckduckgo-osx-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3DB00LOLBBQQ

Thank you - I wasn't aware.

Mr PC Loc: Austin, TX

Computer guy here. Regardless of MAC or PC, it's good to have an external drive for local backup and it's also essential, unless you don't care about your images, to have a good online backup. I have 1.5TB out at Carbonite, it's unlimited and just works for $60 per year or about $110 a year with the added ability to backup one external drive of any size. I have a 4TB WD and a large spare hard drive in my desktop. My images for the current year are always on my laptop for editing, on a 1TB WD slim external drive for transferring to my desktop and the 2 drives in desktop system for redundancy and eventual backup to Carbonite. Call me paranoid, but I've seen people melt down when they've lost their life's work due to flood, fire, theft, you name the disaster. My 2 cents. Get a large external drive and a cloud backup service that you can set and forget, since most people don't have the disciple to manually backup or to check on scheduled backups until it's too late. Good luck.

pixbyjnjphotos Loc: Apache Junction,AZ

I work off a verbatum 500 gig external drive which is backed up on a 1TB My book. I don't make a practice of storing any photos on my 500 gig internal drive which is dedicated to Windows 8.1 and all my programs. The verbatum is about 5 years old and the My book about 3 years old. No issues so far.