Photography Thailand Forum

[johnkphotography]

For those of you who shoot digital, especially RAW, and have problems finding drives large enough to last you more than a couple of months, Seagate has just released a 750 gig hard drive.  They are a bit expensive, but Im sure that within the next couple of years they will become more affordable.  Here is an article on the topic for those of you who are interested.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060426-6684.html

[Marc Schultz]

Thanks for posting that John. A positive development for Seagate.

Actually though, the French company LaCie has been producing 2 Terabyte external hard drives for a while already, which can be used with either PC or MAC. The 2TB drives store 3 times that of the new Seagate drive you noted:

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10351

The price though is also about 3-4 times that of the Seagate one, but to be honest, horses for courses, I would have more faith in trusting my image storage on a drive of that size to LaCie than I would in Seagate, but that is just me.

Incidentally, LaCie also has a 1 Terabyte drive available too. The 1TB drive is still 25% larger than the new Seagate drive and price is nearly the same:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822154071

At the moment, I am using two 300GB Maxtor drives. One as my main and the other as backup, which I backup once a week with a lot of less critical stuff being stored on DVD. But once prices fall a bit more on the 1TB LaCie drives (they used to be over US$1,000), I am planning on buying one and turning the two Maxtor drives both into backup storage.

[johnkphotography]

Thanks for the heads up and links.  It's times like these that I really miss film negatives.

[David Salmanowitz]

Mark--The Lacie 1TB has dropped in price quite a bit from the $1000. I was considering one last year but hard drives being hard drives (meaning they WILL fail at sometime, and whenever that is it is the WRONG time) I opted for 2 500GB hard drives. I figured that was even safer.

[Marc Schultz]

David, my belief is that the only safety net against hard drive failure is to backup everything onto a second hard drive. If you are using one of those two 500GB hard drives you bought as a backup, then I believe it works and you are in fact better off than having bought a 1TB drive. If they are both for storage of original files though, and there is no backup, then you are still hanging yourself out there I believe whether it is a 500GB or 1TB drive.

But in general, those LaCie drives are known to be quite reliable relative to other drive brands. But again, if I were to purchase that 1TB LaCie drive I would still have everything backed up on a series of smaller drives for the very reason you noted.

[Marc Schultz]

I just wanted to add a bit of info on the large capacity hard drives we had been discussing back in April.

I was planning on buying a 1TB LaCie drive overseas because I felt they were much cheaper there. I managed though to just pick one up locally for 29,000 Baht, which is just over US$700. So they have come down quite a bit already here locally. A relief also to have bought it in Thailand becuase buying it overseas would present a warranty coverage problem with it back here in Thailand.