External hard drive question

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madmardle

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This is probably a very basic question, but as my PC is coming to the end of it's life I was thinking about getting an external hard drive to load all my photos onto My question is, as the OS on my PC is XP, what would the situation be if a new PC has a different OS and I wanted to load the pics from the external hard drive? Sorry about such a basic question.
 
As long as you keep using windows, you'll be fine. NTFS is the file format you MUST use. As soon as you buy the disk don't put anything in it and check if it's already formated to NTFS, if not, quick format and good to go. As for the capacity, there's no much sense on buying something small "because I don't need it", 2Tb disks are usually better priced than 1Tb.
 
madmardle said:
This is probably a very basic question, but as my PC is coming to the end of it's life I was thinking about getting an external hard drive to load all my photos onto My question is, as the OS on my PC is XP, what would the situation be if a new PC has a different OS and I wanted to load the pics from the external hard drive? Sorry about such a basic question.
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If you shoot in jpeg the new pc will be able read the files fine.
There's a small chance that if you shoot in raw the new pc might require an update but Window 10 is quite good at reading raw files.
 
MarcHT said:
As long as you keep using windows, you'll be fine. NTFS is the file format you MUST use. As soon as you buy the disk don't put anything in it and check if it's already formated to NTFS, if not, quick format and good to go. As for the capacity, there's no much sense on buying something small "because I don't need it", 2Tb disks are usually better priced than 1Tb.
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No PC manufacturer ships using anything but NTFS these days so he'll be fine with a new Windows 10.
External hard drive I'd be surprised if it's shipped with FAT32 these days but it doesn't matter unless he has files larger than 4GB as it's the file size limitation for FAT32 which by the look of it, he doesn't have.
Don't start me of on USB sticks still being shipped formatted under FAT32.
 
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Snapsh0t said:
Can't read/write them under Android if they're not.
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I know, I'm an android user bur I mainly use them to transfer files bigger than 4GB to other computer.
 
I have 2 external hard drives originally used on my old XP box. I didn't know anything about formatting so I've never looked at what they use. One is fairly old, probably bought soon after the pc, the other is a few years newer but still a bit long in the tooth now. Fast forward to last Christmas when I bought a Windows 10 box. I transferred everything off the XP box onto both external drives and from one of them (the newer one) to the new machine. Apart from initially crashing the new computer (I tried to do everything all at once and I think maybe the pc was trying to suck the files off faster than the external drive could push them out), nothing bad happened and the two external drives are happily backing up the new pc and everything reads perfectly. That was every kind of file you could possibly think of, including images in jpg, raw and quite a few things inbetween. You'll be fine.
 
madmardle said:
Thanks guys, a 2tb it is then.
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A quick price check before you buy can be worthwhile.
Sometimes you can get a lot more disk for not much more cash. And sometimes a super big disk may look good, but it may take you many many years to fill it. By which time, prices will have fallen loads.
 
Great replies guys,
I'm looking at various models and suppliers, prices seem to range from £63 to £151, and I'm struggling to know exactly what I need, other than 2TB, any suggestions please?
 
madmardle said:
Great replies guys,
I'm looking at various models and suppliers, prices seem to range from £63 to £151, and I'm struggling to know exactly what I need, other than 2TB, any suggestions please?
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Personally I like Western Digital external hard drives as I found others not just as reliable but that’s just my experience.

As with any important stuff it should be backed up in multiple places to limit the risk. Depends on your needs but I wouldn’t be 100% reliant on one external hard drive if the files are important to you. If you have Amazon Prime they offer unlimited photo storage as a secondary online back up of the external hard drive.
 
Thank you, I have my photos stored onto CDs and flash drives, I just wanted to have them all on one drive.
 
I've used a lot of WD Passports. Had a problem with one (as I have with drives from other companies), but the others have all been fine. In any case, don't rely on any single drive to store your images - make multiple backups. There's an argument for getting different models for this - I once had two identical drives fail within a short period (I think the manufacturer had been using bad capacitors). You can buy 4TB external drives for £100.
 
If you don’t need portability there’s no need to get a 2.5” drive. 3.5” are cheaper, faster but they need to be plugged to mains to power them up.
 
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