External hard drive for media storage

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Clogs
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External hard drive for media storage

Post by Clogs »

I need help...

Not that kind of help... hm, though... heh...

As part of my minimalising process*, I'm in the market to purchase a new desk top external hard drive on which to store my movies and music. Intrigued by the Seagate 8TB, but I'm not sure it's the right one. I've no Blurays; I do have multilayer animation, though. And I've a lot of stuff to store, so much that my old 2TB Seagate is, well, stuffed.

An alternative is to purchase several drives to pop into my newly-built gaming pc, which has capacity for five, but currently has only one.

I have max £250 to chuck at this.

Any suggestions, please? Clean ones, that is.

*The minimalism challenge is to own just 100 possessions: 1 is my library, physical, and another my library, Kindle: I'm planning on another 1 being a massive hard drive :glance:
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Post by Auntie Slag »

Maybe it would be wiser (and cheaper, and as you have the space), to buy a few smaller hard drives? If you buy a single big expensive drive and it corrupts then you've lost everything! Whereas some smaller ones where one is a dedicated backup might be a good idea?

I know there’s failure rates etc. But if the content is important to you then that should trump the minimalist approach!
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Post by Denyer »

As Auntie says, I'd consider one item "backup drives" -- at least a couple of copies of anything you want to keep, kept onsite, ideally an off-site backup at family/friends/work, and a bit of cloud storage with encryption for anything really important.

Be aware that a lot of external drives now can't be removed from cases and plugged into a PC or USB adapter, as the board is directly attached to the drive.
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Post by Clogs »

Denyer wrote:Be aware that a lot of external drives now can't be removed from cases and plugged into a PC or USB adapter, as the board is directly attached to the drive.
Really? Hadn't picked up on that! Thanks for the tipoff.

I looked at multidrive cabs, but they are positively huge and I've just a little desk. I guess laying out more cash might be necessary: put drives into the spare spaces in the pc case AND grab a single desktop, giving me library plus copy.

My plan is to download movies 'on demand' to the family via the NAS or smaller drives.
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Post by Clogs »

Bought a WD Elements 5TB desktop external hard drive last night and now await delivery. Not too bad a price; I've some cash left and will save up to buy equivalent extra storage to put in the gaming case.

I can download from my 2TB drive and then use that to backup my gaming laptop, which needs it ASAP.

To think, my first home PC had a massive 128gb of data storage and I couldn't fill it :swirly:
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Post by Denyer »

It's still only really video content (inc game assets) and virtual machines that swallow up huge tracts of disk space. Music's edging towards 100GB but that is over nearly a couple of decades.

If memory serves the first hard drive I encountered outside of education was 20MB and in a friend's inherited Archimedes A420. First PC (Win98 first edition) after sadly coming to the conclusion that Acorn was an evolutionary dead end I think was 6.4Gb-ish.

And now things have come around with the generally pathetic, often non-expandable storage capacities offered by most tablets...
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Post by Auntie Slag »

Denyer, is Android 6.0 any good when it comes to the adoptable storage? A friend once told me after going adoptable and moving programs/apps across, an Android update would move them all back again without his say so. Also, the fastest SD cards are currently UHS-3, but that seems to be the bare minimum with adoptable storage.

So I guess my question is, is adoptable storage an unreliable pain in the arse? (I know it's also important to pick a card with fast write speeds of small files as that's what'll be shifting around most of the time).
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Post by Auntie Slag »

And 100Gb music is mightily impressive. I'm only on about 12Gb. What format & bit rate do you save at? Mine are all Mp3 between 160-192 on average, and I'm dreading resaving them all again at proper 'forever' quality. I'm guessing you've long been an Ogg Vorbis or flacc kinda guy!
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Post by Clogs »

I picked up a portable Seagate 2TB for the gaming laptop as the desktop one is a brick: a really good quality brick. That's in: just as big as and heavy as.

Spent out. Will be saving for a new drive to pop in the gaming pc.

(Sad middle-aged female gamer, neh? But my films and music will be safe!)
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Post by Auntie Slag »

My first PC I inherited from my brother for a brief period, an Amstrad PC1512. It was stock configuration so no HDD, though it could have been fitted with a 10 or 20Mb hard drive at the time.

I remember our Art class at school had Archies, and they had an awesome graphics program running (though I can never rememb the name of the package). A couple of years ago I met the guy who wrote Chocks Away, Starfighter and Streetracer 2000 for the Archimedes. Really cool, very inspirational and self-taught.
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Post by Denyer »

Auntie Slag wrote:And 100Gb music is mightily impressive. I'm only on about 12Gb. What format & bit rate do you save at? Mine are all Mp3 between 160-192 on average, and I'm dreading resaving them all again at proper 'forever' quality. I'm guessing you've long been an Ogg Vorbis or flacc kinda guy!
There's a bit of that with some Bandcamp purchases, but it's mostly just about 18K individual files. Vast majority ripped as LAME alt present standard VBR MP3.

"Forever" is still CDs and DVDs generally, personally. For actual listening or watching good MP3s are fine, or it's often easier to download something than find the DVD.
I remember our Art class at school had Archies, and they had an awesome graphics program running (though I can never rememb the name of the package).
Probably this -- http://www.cconcepts.co.uk/products/artworks.htm ?
Or http://www.apdl.org.uk/isvproducts/dwm.htm
A couple of years ago I met the guy who wrote Chocks Away, Starfighter and Streetracer 2000 for the Archimedes. Really cool, very inspirational and self-taught.
Mmm, lot of very smart people who went on to interesting things. Also sadly a fair few deaths -- Dave Holden of APDL, Paul Vigay, etc. and not just because of the older demographic.
is Android 6.0 any good when it comes to the adoptable storage?
I've mainly gone with Nexus devices (plus a display unit Galaxy A5 for portability) so mine either don't leave the house and can stream from Samba network shares or it's easy enough to load up an SD card.

What's the usage case? For anything much more than consumption, but portable, a laptop or that sort of tablet is probably a better bet. Pick something with Intel hardware for best compatibility and you're not limited to Windows -- quite happily have Linux on one of Lenovo's entry level Yoga machines.
Clogs wrote:the desktop one is a brick: a really good quality brick. That's in: just as big as and heavy as.
Will take that a recommendation -- although I'm a bit wary of larger drives for the moment. Still an annoying general lack of alternative multi-terabyte options, though.
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External Hard Drive 4 Media Storage

Post by Mr_Hi_n_Mitey »

Clogs wrote:I need help...

Not that kind of help... hm, though... heh...

As part of my minimalising process*, I'm in the market to purchase a new desk top external hard drive on which to store my movies and music. Intrigued by the Seagate 8TB, but I'm not sure it's the right one. I've no Blurays; I do have multilayer animation, though. And I've a lot of stuff to store, so much that my old 2TB Seagate is, well, stuffed.

An alternative is to purchase several drives to pop into my newly-built gaming pc, which has capacity for five, but currently has only one.

I have max £250 to chuck at this.

Any suggestions, please? Clean ones, that is.

*The minimalism challenge is to own just 100 possessions: 1 is my library, physical, and another my library, Kindle: I'm planning on another 1 being a massive hard drive :glance:

Wow, if you had lived over here in the USA, I would have suggested that you visit either OfficeMax or Staples; they have some of the best deals on external hard drives out there. Their products are usually high quality but at low prices; I personally have never had any problems with any of their products, but then, I can only speak for myself. If I'm not mistaken, many of their drives can go up to four (or more) terabytes of digital memory. I'm fixing to buy at least FOUR external hard drives from those companies myself - along with a very large All-in-One and a (Dell) touchscreen computer laptop with a CD-ROM/CD/DVD drive with ports for everything else.
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Post by Auntie Slag »

My micro SD card chose to make itself unreadable JUST as I was moving between phones. It'll take a bit of faffing but I think I'll be able to get the photos and videos off the card, then reinitialise it.

This is the first time I felt I've ever had any kind of storage device fail on me, backup drives are so important!
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