View Full Version : External hard drive
Can anyone tell me what specifications I should look for on an external hard drive?
I would be using it to work on web design projects.
I Need to buy one and am completely clueless... Please help!
Thank you!
Yeoman742
09-18-2010, 05:18 PM
Ok, couple things you should note.. First is size, how big do you want it, its relative to price.. Bigger drives cost more.. Second, are you looking for portability?? Some external hard drives have power supplies that come with them, while others use the USB cable as its power supply, and some require a docking station (I think those are the seagate drives).. I personally use one of those western digital pocket drives, but mine is only 250gb and have had only one problem with them (caused by formatting it by mistake).. No matter if you are using a portable drive or internal, remember to back up your material otherwise you could not recover if it ever crashes..
Thank you Yeoman742!
I'm wondering how fast does a hard drive need to be and
which connection firewire 400 or 800 or USB2 is better, to work
from the hard drive to dreamweaver/flash/illustrator etc. Im using a Macbook Pro.
Thanks!
chrisg
09-18-2010, 10:30 PM
Hi RZS,
FireWire drives technically can push data faster than the USB 2.0 drives. Since you're going to be doing web design, you're not going to be using much of the speed resources, as opposed to having to stream video off of the drive. You should be writing and reading image/document files, so any of the drives should work well. If you find yourself working with very large PSD or Illustrator files, it may be worthwhile for you to buy a FireWire external hard drive.
To echo Yeaoman742, external hard drives are unstable and have a much higher break rate than internal hard drives. Try to back up your data to a more secure hard drive or DVD once in awhile to make sure you are still okay if the HD fails. Good luck!
Thank you chrisg!!
I got an iomega 500gb with firewire 400/800 plus USB 2 in case I need to stream video from it.
Hope it does the job!
Thanks again for your help and also thanks to Yeoman742.