External Harddrive

JeremyLangford

JeremyLangford

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I am planning to buy an external hard-drive to hold my his-res scans from my new Coolscan 9000. I will be using it with one of the new $1200 MacBook Pros. What are the key things to look for when buying an external hard-drive?

1) Gigs
2) RPM
3) USB or Firewire?

What else?

Do I need to be able to boot from the external hard-drive and daisy-chain it to the scanner? I read that you can boot from USB drives with the new Intel Macs.

Is there a point when the RPM of the hard-drive is too fast for the USB or Firewire to transfer data at full speed?
 
JeremyLangford said:
I am planning to buy an external hard-drive to hold my his-res scans from my new Coolscan 9000. I will be using it with one of the new $1200 MacBook Pros. What are the key things to look for when buying an external hard-drive?

1) Gigs
2) RPM
3) USB or Firewire?

What else?

Do I need to be able to boot from the external hard-drive and daisy-chain it to the scanner? I read that you can boot from USB drives with the new Intel Macs.

Is there a point when the RPM of the hard-drive is too fast for the USB or Firewire to transfer data at full speed?
Click to expand...

If you're using it to store photos, you don't need all the fancy stuff. Gigs more than anything else. RPM is for access speed - you'll be bottlenecked by the throughput of USB or Firewire, so the RPM speeds matters not.

As to USB or Firewire, I am told FW is slightly faster than USB 2.0, but USB is definitely cheaper. The difference is slight in speed, so I'd choose USB, but YMMV.

Buy two drives, not one. Don't worry about daisy-chaining, leave one unplugged (and for best results, off-premises). Get a backup plan that has you doing two identical backups - one per drive. That eliminates the problem of single source of failure. I have dealt with crying person who knocked an external drive off their desk - it was the end of decades of work. Don't have one single source of failure. Just FYI.

And buy at www.newegg.com and save a bundle.
 
Hello.

OK, I don't want to sound arrogant or anything but I do know a fair amount about this, purely in terms of using the damn things for many years for intensive video and large storage work. I would only ever suggest getting a G-Tech drive, I'd never suggest a Lacie or Maxtor or anything else, just G-Tech. Get a Firewire 800 and you'll be good to go.

I'd go for a 1 terrabyte, as long as it has a Firewire 800 it'll be plenty fast enough.

Hope that helps.

A.
 
Exactly what Bill said - buy two drives and backup to both.

I have scripts for Windows and Linux to sync one to another (i.e. use one and then run the script every night / week / whenever to push the state of the master to the slave).
 
kully said:
I have scripts for Windows and Linux to sync one to another (i.e. use one and then run the script every night / week / whenever to push the state of the master to the slave).
Click to expand...

Me too, but I only run Linux on my home machines. Perl is my friend, and exiftool is like a gift from the gods.
 
If you are using a Macbook Pro, why not just use a wireless Time Capsule - 1 TB?

I wouldn't go this route. There have been all sorts of disk corruption issues with using time capsule wirelessly. Nevermind it'd also be much slower. I think the best route in this case is the simplest route, described above: get two hard drives, and save your files to both.
 
i have an older G4 PowerBook with only a 40GB HD and have been archiving scans and music to CDs. i finally broke down and just ordered a 1TB Lacie Ethernet Disk Mini for about $150. gonna use it wirelessly.
 
Someone alluded to it above, but you might want to consider a hardware RAID solution. Depending on what you store and how important it is to you, you'll want to back up this data across multiple drives. Perl scripts, and rsync are fine at synchronizing data across drives, but they're cumbersome and not as quick (or reliable) as a hardware RAID solution. Same goes for a Time Capsule based strategy - using this to store all of your data/images leaves a single point of failure.

Depending on your setup and requirements (wired/wireless, raid 0/1/5, reliability, etc) you might want to consider something from the D-Link line of home storage products: http://www.dlink.com/products/?sec=0&pid=667 or even something like Drobo (sexy but pricey): http://drobo.com/
 
My advice is this: build it. It's really easier than it sounds, much cheaper, and you get what you want (sometimes). Go to newegg.com and look for external enclosures. Decide on a one or two drive setup. Two drives lets you RAID for data safety, but I don't bother - I simply buy a new external drive once a year or so and migrate with the old drive as a backup. These enclosures are almost always better quality than what you get with a pre-fab exernal drive. You can find enclosures with multiple interfaces, like esata + firewire 800 + firewire 400 on one enclosure.

Re: firewire vs. USB - USB delivered data is managed more centrally by your PC, whereas firewire offloads some of this to the devices. FW is able to run faster, more consistantly, as a result. I like the ability to daisy chain because it means I don't have to buy another hub. (There's other linux issues, as well....)

Spend some time choosing the drive and filesystem carefully if you're concerned about securing your data against failure. (can apple do reiserfs?)
 
RAID is an extremely bad idea for the home user, unless the drives can be split and used without the RAID hardware/software.

RAID takes two or more drives and applies technology to allow them to save data in with redundancy and error-checking, along with other conveniences, depending upon RAID level. However, it re-introduces the single point of failure - the RAID hardware/software itself. If it fails, your multiply-redundant drives are useless unless and until you are able to rebuild with identical equipment, if then. Businesses with dedicated IT departments are well-equipped for such contingencies, which makes RAID very useful for them. Home users, not so much.

The basic USB or Firewire or eSATA connected drive that can be mounted by the native operating system (whatever that may be) is the simplest and most direct solution. Duplicate drives - not RAID but duplicate - are more work, because you have to copy your data twice, but they completely eliminate the bottleneck of the single point of failure. As you can also store one or more drives offsite, they also offer additional protection against theft (if someone breaks in, they'll take your PC, external enclosures, etc) and natural disasters.

I spend time at home in NC twice a year, and I always leave behind an external drive loaded with all my photos up to date, taking back to MI the one I left previously. This rotation protects me in a way that RAID cannot. RAID is an expensive technical solution that makes the problem worse for home users. I advise you to stay away from it.
 
The Coolscan cannot be daisy chained with another device on the same firewire port, so you won't be able to run a firewire drive and the scanner at the same time. With Firewire devices daisychaining should be no problem, but the Coolscans have a fair few quirks....

But most firewire drives have a USB port as well, so you could connect it by that while your scanning and then use the faster firewire connection when the scanner's off and your editing etc.
 
Last edited:
historicist said:
The Coolscan cannot be daisy chained with another device on the same firewire port, so you won't be able to run a firewire drive and the scanner at the same time. With Firewire devices daisychaining should be no problem, but the Coolscans have a fair few quirks....

But most firewire drives have a USB port as well, so you could connect it by that while your scanning and then use the faster firewire connection when the scanner's off and your editing etc.
Click to expand...

Thats a bummer.

Most of the things being said in this thread are unfortunately over my head. However, my dad has just come home with an external hard-drive for me that he bought from NewEgg. I didn't know he was going to get one and I was hoping to wait until I learned more about them.

Anyways, it's a Hitachi SATA 3.0 7200RPM hard drive and a seperate CoolMax enclosure with USB 2.0 and eSATA.

The fastest choice for my macbook would be a FireWire 800 enclosure right?
 
Lets see if I can understand Hard-drives a little better.

Does my Hitachi SATA 3.0 7200RPM hard-drive have a "disk-to-buffer" data transfer rate of about 70 megabytes per second and a "buffer-to-computer" interface of about 300 megabytes per second?
 
That has been my experience, with many scanners not even allowing a hub. Have you tried the CS on a hub?
Click to expand...

No, I don't have one, but in the manual IIRC they state that it must be connected directly to the computer. Actually, I don't think I've even tried to daisy chain it just to check (the manual says it won't work) but given how sketchy the firewire is on the 8000/9000 it'd be very surprising if it did.

Does my Hitachi SATA 3.0 7200RPM hard-drive have a "disk-to-buffer" data transfer rate of about 70 megabytes per second and a "buffer-to-computer" interface of about 300 megabytes per second?
Click to expand...

more or less. The disk (as are all hard disks) is considerably slower than the theoretical maximum speed of the interface. USB is about the only connection method where the interface is the limiting factor on speed, not the disk.
 
Realistically, USB2 is going to be fine for you. It can more than keep up with your scanner, and your backups (you will be backing up, right?) will be rolling while you're asleep, so who cares. I buy Firewire drives for audio recording--I boot from one and record to the other. For my photo stuff, I save the 30 bucks and use USB drives that back up to my Time Capsule.

ETA: I also obsessively mirror the data I *really* don't want to lose, manually, to storage in different places. Along the lines of what Bill mentioned but not as far away and more regularly.
 
I'm not so sure - I've got both USB and Firewire disks and Firewire is noticeably faster. For backups as you say it doesn't really matter, and scanning is so slow anyway that a slightly slower disk makes only a very marginal difference, but if you're opening 60MB TIFFs all the time it makes a difference.

But for sure I wouldn't look the gift horse of a USB drive in the mouth 😉
 
I'm not using my hard-drive for backups of scans that are also on my Macbook. I am going to scan to my Macbook and then save all of the 60MB TIFFs on the external to save that room on the internal.
 
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