Railfan Technology > External Hard Drive Opinion wanted

Good Evening,

I'm planning in the near future to buy a external hard drive for the storage of videos.  I'm asking if it would be better to get a portable one that does not use an external power source or to just go ahead and get probably a 5TB with an external power source.  Thoughts? Any one care to share their experience with either type?

Thanks in Advance
Tehachapi-TJ Over & Out.

Normally, I use the portable ones to transfer between computers.  Several main storage devices all have external power supplies.

Would not rely on just one???   If you are going to keep only one copy then certainly would prefer several smaller ones as opposed to one large drive with every thing.

Bob

I use Western Digital hard drives. 

I use a portable with no external power to transfere photos to while on the go, or to occasionally use it to access files I may use in the field that I don't have stored on the laptop.
I've used it for about 8 years with almost no problems.

I have two External Hard Drives with seprate power supplies to which I burn all my backups to.  I've had one for about 10 years and the other for about four years now.
I don't like to rely on only one copy since even hard drives are known to crash from time to time. 

I think later this summer I will be adding a personal cloud storage system as well.  I had a thread abou these on here a few weeks ago.

Kris

Take a look at the Seagate 5TB external HD from B&H Photo.  I use it for my video storage and a second one for back-up.

Although the cost per terabyte of hard drive is getting cheaper by the day, external storage is always more expensive than the equivalent internal storage.  I can well recall paying $400 for a 40 MEGAbyte drive 25 years ago or so.  Space is REALLY cheap these days!  So are CPUs! 

My methodology is to have all my hard drives on 'slider' trays, as are my SSDs.  That way, with the computer powered off, I can unlock the drive(s), open the doors, and put different drives in their place...all in less than 30 seconds.  While I don't have videos consuming large volumes of space, I do have perhaps 15,000 or more photos I've taken on my drives.  When it's time to add more, after all processing is completed (on the SSD), I move the entire folder to an 'archive' HD.  I have two copies of each on internal HDs...one in the computer, spinning, and one on the shelf, in the static-free bag it came in.

However, in the event of fire/theft/flood/tornado, I have off-site storage storage as well.  For that, I use an external HD, complete with its wall-wart power supply and larger-than-needed mostly plastic case.  I used to keep it in a drawer at work, but now it's at a friends house.  Unfortunately, I outgrew my drive sizes, so I've graduated to 3tb drives all around.  I'm still undecided whether to give the old drives to a friend or use them to upgrade my Windows XP computer that I use for software that can't be made to run on anything later than XP.  

You might be interested in my recent external hard drive adventure.

http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?9,3668842,3669732#msg-3669732

d,

I have used a LaCie 4T external HD for over 5 years now..(with a Mac pro)
Many, many videos (over 50) & 60 minute epic vids....Never had one problem!!!!
No Stills, just videos...set up in a raid (sp) config that loads twice as fast.
Just saying, I'm happy