Recommendations for external HD please

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theshortstack

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Simon
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Afternoon all,

I'm looking to purchase an external HD to store my pictures on as they're starting to take up a lot of space on my computer.

I was looking at the Western Digital My Passport drive, but noticed that I need to plug it into a USB socket in order to move pictures to and from it. Ideally, I'd like something which is 'always on' - something that will allow me to put the Hard Drive in a corner and forget about it, but access it when I want to directly from my computer.

Does such a thing exist? And if so, what models would you recommend?

Thanks a lot for your help
 
I just bought a WD 1Tb passport drive last week. I have it plugged in to one of our computers upstairs. It works well, no problems and is very compact - 1/2 the size of a Kindle.

I'm pretty sure when I was in at Maplins that they had some WiFi external hard drives. Worth a look on-line.
 
What you are talking about is a NAS which stands for Network Access Storage.
You can put in more than one hard drive, configure whatever RAID you want and then you plug it in to your router via ethernet.

Then on all your computers connected to that router you can access the files and copy to and from.

I have one, but I would recommend just getting a normal external as transfer speeds can be slow.
 
sparkzweb said:
What you are talking about is a NAS which stands for Network Access Storage.
You can put in more than one hard drive, configure whatever RAID you want and then you plug it in to your router via ethernet.
Click to expand...

Ah ok - thanks sparkz. So am I right in saying that a NAS drive is essentially a network box that you can plug hard drives in to? Having read through a few reviews, it seems that some come with software too in order to add extra functionality like sending backups to other machines. Is that right?
 
Yep. Let me use my own case as an example.

I have the Netgear Stora NAS. There are 2 1TB hard drives in there, configured in RAID so that one of the hard drives is a backup of the other hard drive - essentially the backup of the backup (instead you could just have it set normally)

I can then access the files on there via a mac or pc.
The software that came with it allows me to setup automatic backups eg. backup this folder every week at 8PM. Its also compatible with mac time machine software.
The software also has a few other nifty features such as making multiple user accounts.

On top of that anywhere in the world I can go to a website, login with my username and password and access/download my files from that site. You can also view your photos in a sort of gallery on that site.

My NAS has all that and is something like 2 to 3 years old, the new ones probably have some new crazy features.

In terms of sending backups to other machines, I've never done that but you can definitely automate the sending and receiving of files and folders.
 
Sounds good - I think I'm certainly interested.


How do NAS systems integrate with software packages like Lightroom? Given that you need to login to your NAS, are you able to access directly from Lightroom or is it a case that you have to move images off the NAS to work on and then physically move them back again once you've finished?
 
Not too sure but you know how on the left hand side it shows sources like eg. SD Card, my documents, my pictures, external etc.

The NAS shows up in the same manner, so theoretically you should be able to do that.
 
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