Storage......CD or external HD?

[Liz]

I found a very small (mini in size) lightweight 80G external HD at Costco for $149 which would be easy to carry around. My pc does not include a CD burner.

I'm looking for suggestions as to which is better to use for photo storage? Keep in mind that - relatively speaking - I probably store a lot less than the majority of photographers here. I'm looking at cost-effective - how long the CD will last vs HD - and there are most likely issues I'm not considering since I'm a bit "technically challenged."

Also is this a reasonable price to pay for this? I know you can get them cheaper but they're 3-4 times bigger.

Thanks for any input, thoughts, suggestions, advice.

Liz

[another view]

I'm looking for suggestions as to which is better to use for photo storage

Both. Honestly, both. Maybe you heard this story before, but a year or so ago when I lost the internal hard drive in my tower, it somehow took a bunch of images out of my external HD. I remember working with the external drive doing something in Photoshop and the computer did something really wierd - this was a day or two before the big crash. So - I was glad that I also had CD's for backup. I even turn the thing off when I'm not using it to try to keep things like that from happening; bad timing I guess.

I guess I'd also be worried about carrying my only backup on a portable HD. If it's dropped, it might be done for. If it gets lost, same deal. External CD burners shouldn't be that much anymore, and I think I might go that route first if the external is something that you really want to carry with you. It takes a little longer to find an image on a CD, but if they're jpegs (and not thousands of them) and you're fairly organized then you should be OK. That suited me just fine at the time.

[Franglais]

I found a very small (mini in size) lightweight 80G external HD at Costco for $149 which would be easy to carry around. My pc does not include a CD burner.

I'm looking for suggestions as to which is better to use for photo storage? Keep in mind that - relatively speaking - I probably store a lot less than the majority of photographers here. I'm looking at cost-effective - how long the CD will last vs HD - and there are most likely issues I'm not considering since I'm a bit "technically challenged."

Also is this a reasonable price to pay for this? I know you can get them cheaper but they're 3-4 times bigger.

Thanks for any input, thoughts, suggestions, advice.

Liz

I have a "Rampant paranoia" approach to photo storage. Basically I store my photos in an ACDSee library on my internal 300GB hard drive but I have copies of my photos on CD-R (first copy before placement in the library) then DVD-RW and offline external USB 300GB hard drive (copy of the library - I tend to move things around). I expect that in 5 years time I will have several complete copies of my entire library, including one on a portable multimedia center like my ARCHOS 700.

I think that your 80GB drive for $149 is a good buy but these things are very fragile. Don't carry it around if it's going to be your main storage, put it somewhere safe. I have an ARCHOS GMini 40GB drive which I put in my trouser pocket, but it's just for unloading my CF cards when I'm out on a shoot.

Charles

[Lionheart]

I found a very small (mini in size) lightweight 80G external HD at Costco for $149 which would be easy to carry around. My pc does not include a CD burner.

I'm looking for suggestions as to which is better to use for photo storage? Keep in mind that - relatively speaking - I probably store a lot less than the majority of photographers here. I'm looking at cost-effective - how long the CD will last vs HD - and there are most likely issues I'm not considering since I'm a bit "technically challenged."

Also is this a reasonable price to pay for this? I know you can get them cheaper but they're 3-4 times bigger.

Thanks for any input, thoughts, suggestions, advice.

Liz

If that drive is what I think it is (IOGEAR), it's a very nice drive. It powers completely from the USB port, is actually a lot more robust than it looks. It uses a laptop drive, so it's not the worlds fastest drive, but it's great for transporting large amounts of data between office and home, or other site to site transport where DVD-R's are not large enough. As far as a storage solution for archiving? It's a tad small. I'm a paranoid storage freak when it comes to photos. I've got 4 drives in my pc, 3 for backups (identical), plus an external Seagate, plus DVD-R's stacked in 3 CD albums. That of course represents only 4 years of digital photography and 2 years of scanned film, so you can see why I would think 80 GB is a little limited. btw, we use the iogear 80 GB here at the office for transporting large volumes of photos that would take too long to burn on CD or DVD, and it has been a great drive, but I wouldn't use it as a backup drive for too long.