[cspuryear]

It may be a silly question, but I was wondering how much external storage is too much. I basically am looking at an external drive for MP3's (a few thousand), family pictures (growing by the day w/ our 4 month old), and video of the same.....

Is there any issue w/ higher capacity external FW drives for the Mac? I currently have a 20" iMac G4.......

Thanks in advance

[Macola]

If you're working with video, no amount of storage is ever too much

[tooki]

The downside to the biggest drives is that a) if it fails, you lose a lot more at one time, and b) the biggest drives are the most cutting-edge, so the cost per gigabyte is appreciably higher.

tooki

[©öñFü$íóÑ]

I think you should also ask if it makes sense to store anything on a hard disk for the long term....
I mean, hard disks store things magnetically. So in theory, if you were to say stop using the hard drive after any given number of years, or just let it stay off and inactive for whatever reason, the data that you have stored on it would start to degrade and render it unusable.

Besides, how often are you going to look at those photos/movies? Maybe at most 3-4 times in a month for each. Once for the first glance, twice to double check, thrice to work with them and burn them on CD/DVD, and maybe a fourth time to show them to friends and family.

But otherwise, you're more likely to store them for the long term and not look at them until the time comes maybe a few years from now.

example: i have a Power Mac 6100 from 1995 with a little over 150 MB worth of critical software, documents, and family photos on it.

(-i didn't have a CD burner back in those days and i never thought it necessary to back things up-)

But ever since i bought my PC, i stopped using my mac and kept it -inactive- for a little over 4 years (starting in 2000). Then, when i powered it on in 2005, the Mac OS was fine, but i wound up with a lot of corrupted files or lost files.

It makes more sense to store things on DVD's. Especially movies and photos.
The plus side to this is that you can obviously view them on any modern DVD player or any upcoming DVD player yet to be released. And this gives your computer a break from having to index everything that's stored on it. It'll keep your system lean and frees up more room to work with new photos and movies.

As for MP3's, a large hard drive is a sensible option.
I mean, let's say the average MP3 is about 6 MegaBytes each.
Now if you have around 3,000 or so MP3s, that would be (3,000 MP3s*6 MB) or 18,000 MB. That's not even 18 Gigs.
So if you plan on obtaining more MP3's from wherever or however means, I'd say an external 80-100 Gig hard disk would suit you fine for however long your taste in music lasts.

[Eug Wanker]

Yeah, it's not just the cost of the storage, but the cost of the storage PLUS BACKUP (assuming the stuff needs to be backed up, which is usually the case).

500 GB is not too much for some usage, but hopefully you have lots of space to backup most of that too.

I think I've got about 400 GB storage, with about 3xx GB of backup (which is OK since I've only got about 200+ GB of data at the moment).

P.S. I backup the most important stuff to DVD fairly regularly too. The less important stuff I backup to DVD as well, but less regularly. I can't wait until HD DVD or Blu-ray computer drives and their media are cheap.

It makes more sense to store things on DVD's. Especially movies and photos.
The plus side to this is that you can obviously view them on any modern DVD player or any upcoming DVD player yet to be released. And this gives your computer a break from having to index everything that's stored on it. It'll keep your system lean and frees up more room to work with new photos and movies.

To each his own, but I personally find it extremely irritating to have to search through a bunch of discs to find the pix I want. It's much simpler to just have it all on the hard drive... with the caveat as I said that it's backed up on a second hard drive, AND it's backed up on DVD too.

OTOH, I do generally do what you say for home movies, because I never look at them anyway.

[eltrut]

There is never too much storage, only to much $ / GB.

Smaller storage is more cost effective. Three years from now, 500GB will be nothing.

[mduell]

Current Seagate SATA drive pricing at Newegg:

Size Price $/GB
160 $74 0.463
200 $85 0.425
250 $90 0.360
300 $100 0.333
320 $120 0.375
400 $205 0.513
500 $290 0.580
750 $425 0.567

The optimum is around 250-300GB, but the higher capacity drives (400-750GB) are all about the same price per gig.
If you're looking at 500GB, you may as well go for 750GB; if you don't really need that much, 300GB gives you more bang for your buck.

[eltrut]

I'd definitely go for a Seagate. The 5 years warranty just eases my mind.

[ghporter]

©öñFü$íóÑ, do you have any data to back up your assertion that hard drive data degrades with time? The technology is supposed to permanently magnetize each bit-space on the drive platter in the appropriate polarity, so as long as the drive isn't exposed to high level magnetic fields it should last a long, long time-decades at least.

[icruise]

Yeah, I've never had any problem with hard disks deteriorating over time. In fact, I recently booted up a laptop that I've had since 1993 and it seemed to be fine. On the other hand, I have had some pretty major reliability issues with DVD-Rs.

I've got two 250GB drives that I use for my external storage needs. I don't see a big advantage to getting a single larger drive, and as people have already pointed out there are some disadvantages to having all of your files in one place.

In the end, though, no matter what you chose you must back things up in multiple ways. Have your music on your hard disk, but also put it on DVD-R and maybe a second hard disk just for storage.

[mac1896]

Originally Posted by cspuryear

It may be a silly question, but I was wondering how much external storage is too much. I basically am looking at an external drive for MP3's (a few thousand), family pictures (growing by the day w/ our 4 month old), and video of the same.....

Is there any issue w/ higher capacity external FW drives for the Mac? I currently have a 20" iMac G4.......

If the Data that you're going to have on it is too valuable to lose, and will be irreplaceable if lost, then you may want to consider going to a multi-disc "Mirrored RAID" (this can be done with software for your iMac G4).

Assuming that you are using at least OS 10.3, here's the Mac native way to go:

http://www.samspublishing.com/articl...seqNum=11&rl=1

If you are using OS 9, or prefer software other than Apple's to do the raid setup:

http://www.charismac.com/Products/RAID/raiddata.html

You could use 4-250GB drives in a RAID enclosure, and your backups will be done as you go.

Originally Posted by Macola

If you're working with video, no amount of storage is ever too much

Even for music, it's all too true.

[ginoledesma]

I think the hard drive is more likely to suffer a head crash/failure than the data on the platter "dying" due to deterioration over time. Most of the old hard drives I have (80MB, 160MB, 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, 20GB) suffered that fate. Some even make very bad sounds (as if the head were banging against the platter/sides).

I currently have 2x300GB drives and I've already run out of space (one serving as backup to important data). I bought a 500GB drive from Fry's when they had a sale and I'm most likely to fill it up (to dedicate one of my 300GB as a pure backup drive).

[tooki]

That banging sound isn't the heads contacting the disk platter (that, an actual head crash, is an exceedingly rare occurrence). What you're hearing is the head snapping back and forth to the end of its range of motion.

Most hard disk problems are either in the bearings that let the spindle turn, or in the head actuator mechanism.

tooki