external hard drive.

Just fit a second drive in your PC, if u have room. It's so easy and cheap

Well I'm not getting into a cleverness/experience bidding contest but while I know a fair bit I'm not above taking advice from the staff at either place when it's plain they've been trained well. They sell so many items like this they do seem to know what works.

Also, I have had end of line bargains at both places.

Mike

there are usually one or two people in PC world who are up to speed but they are seldom the sales staff. The sales staff are more likely to try to sell you what they want to shift rather than what you need.

Gosh..I do seem to have stirred up a whole lot of opinions. I have a laptop and so cannot fit a second drive. I have had several laptops and not one hard drive failure. Are external drives different beasts or likely to be more vulnerable outside of a machine. If I get a large drive and partition it, can I treat it as two drives or will failure bring both partitions down. Apologies if I am asking silly questions. I only have the Forum for advive. regards Thoramay

Short answer, Yes, a failure will bring down both drives.

Long answer, when you partition a drive, you're simply creating a 'logical' drive on the 'physical' drive. You can create as many logical drives as you like (within reason) on any given physical drive.

If something happens to the physical drive, then everything on it is affected.

I've always found Samsung internal drives excellent value and reliability, so I bought two external drive enclosures, and two 1 Tb drives, and spent five minutes putting the drives in the enclosures.

Over USB they're not bad; over e-SATA, AFAICT they're as fast as the drives in the PC - my nightly backup copies about two 70 Mb TIFF files per second.

Obviously, it won't have the robustness of something like this, but if you're careful, and use it as a backup, not as a sole place to store things, I don't see the need for such an expensive solution.

I used to know a bloke that used this strategy. It was perfect, until one day, the PC's power supply went a bit wrong, and there was a fire inside the case.

Result: two rather charred and unusable hard drives, and everything was gone.

The thing about backup is that the cost of reliability goes up, as you seek to reduce the risk of data loss, and it all comes down to how much you value the data.

No backup: very cheap, and you'll probably get away with it for a long time.

Internal backup: not quite as cheap, and it's a lot better than nothing.

External backup: a bit more expensive again. Now the PC can melt and you've still got everything.

Off-site backup: the minimum for anything that's genuinely important to you and irreplaceable. You may think that the chance of both the PC and the external drive failing at the same time are minimal, but if you get burgled, you'll be ruing the day you thought that.

Another aspect for advice. I will be storing something like 300 raw files on my laptop drive. How much will this affect the start up times and usage? Putting these on an external drive could possibly help, or not? The photos are not of family but for club competitions. regrads thoramay.

It shouldn't impact on start up time, but will obviously take up hard disk space which might impact on overall performance.

I go along with the external storage solution personally, but have you considered moving the files to SD or CF cards? It depends how much/often you need to access them, but the lower capacity cards are quite cheap in both formats, easy to store, etc

Interesting option, JohnX. I am using extreme 111 cards for the camera. I would need to convert the stored raw to jpeg simply to see what the pics were when looking at the contents. Would I need to still use the extreme 111 cards or would the extreme 11 be satisfactory to use for storage? Probably two 8gb's would do the trick and it would be relatively easy to pull up the contents. Am I following your thinking. regards Thoramay.

Flash memory cards are not the best option for long tern storage as they may eventually become unreadable. Although the memory is non-volatile for all normal purposes it isn't actually permanent.

I wouldn't go for cards, they are simply to expensive.
For those two 8gb cards you can get 160gb external hardisk probable.
If you want to go small get a 2.5" hardisk, western digital mypassport for example. It's small and only needs one usb port to use, no external power needed.
If that's still to big look at usb sticks, they are also cheaper then cards, and usb sticks you can plug in to any computer, with cards you need an adapter.

What camera were your dads photos taken with & what RAW format are they in ? You should be able to install a RAW codec from the relevant manufacturer (or adobe in the case of dng) - this will allow you to view thumbnails of the files in your windows browser.

If it's only 300 files & a one off then USB sticks may be the best option just to transfer them over, check if the host computer has a DVD burner though as this would be an even more cost-effective solution.

Thanks for your input. At best, I can upload photos into CS3, do what is necessary, save them, print them and file them and use them for photo club comps. I only want to retain the best. I am sure I can burn them to a cd for safe storage, if I can get the expertise to do so. Looking for a simpler method and a quick way to access them. Not sure if a CD would give me that freedom, but I simply don't know. The sandisk would give me that freedom and I understand how to use them. I thought this would be the solution but I do understand the risk. Interestingly, I am searching for a download that will enable me to see raw files as thumbnails saved from a K10. Digital camera mag did an article and a CD giving these details but I did not realise the importance and passed them on. Can anyone offer me details of this download which will also read other raw files which I cannot open at the moment in CS3. regards Thoramay

I use a USB stick for the photo club simply save them as JPG and drop them on the stick and done, it's even simpler as using cards so if you can use cards you can use sticks as well.

Here is a link for the RAW codecs, some are free and some not link