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Giant hard drives (1 Viewer)

Vectis Birder

Vectis Birder

Itchy feet
My external hard drive packed in some time ago, and my PC's hard drive was getting ridiculously full, so I've invested in a new external drive.
So, I go to Staples and buy a Iomega hard drive, all 1000GB (yes, you read that right it's 1 Terabyte) of it - I didn't know they made them that big, I'd heard rumours of 1 TB computer drives but didn't know these were available to Joe Public yet.
It was a bargain £169.99, reduced to even more of a bargain £99.99 because I had a Staples voucher.

I connected it to my computer and it didn't see it - well it saw it in the disk management section but not in 'My Computer'. I have had to go in to all the arcane stuff I don't like touching and assign a drive letter and format the thing. Because of the huge size of the disk it is taking ages.

So, if you find youself needing an external hard drive, you might need to format it and assign a drive letter to it.

Hopefully once it's eventually finished doing its thing I can save all my photos and other gubbins on it and clear some space on my laptop! I can't see myself filling up 1 Terabyte in a hurry.
 
I've recently bought a 'My Book' 1TB drive from Western Digital. It came ready-formatted, but it was FAT32 - which I didn't find out until my backup program stopped when the file it was creating reached the FAT limit 200GB. Still, didn't take long to reformat it as NTFS.
 
I have now transferred all my files and photos I don't imediately need onto the new drive and while it has freed most of my 100GB laptop drive, as you'd expect it's showing up as a thin blue line in the disk space pie chart of the 1TB drive, being 10 times the size of my laptop drive.

As I have formatted it on this computer will it work on another machine (as long as the file system on the other machine is also NTFS)?

I think my drive was pre-formatted (FAT32), Frank, but like you I had to change it to NTFS.
 
on a similar theme I have 2x 500GB LaCie hard drives which I have 60% full of photos from my PC; having just bought a Mac I find that I can access the drives but I cannot write anything to them; comes up with a message along the lines of you do not have permission --so I cannot add photos to my library of folders that has taken me years to construct!--is this because they were formatted for Windows and the Mac cannot use that system or is there a more fundamental problem?
 
Sounds like it, Graham. I think Macs can't write to NTFS partitions by default, but you can obtain drivers which enable this. I wouldn't want to comment on how safe this is for valuable data!.

Mac's native format is HFS+, but they can also read/write to FAT32 so this is often used to share data between PC/Mac/Linux.
 
thanks for that; looks like I may have to buy a new external and transfer the pictures via the Mac then reformat the old ones? I guess that may work
 
For all of you keeping your images on an external drive, make sure you listen to the first post on this thread that talked about his external drive failing. If the images are something you really want and they only exist on your external drive, make sure you back them up too. One other way to deal with that is to get one of the devices that many vendors, like maxtor or seagate, have that contains two physical drives. I've got one for example that has two 500 GB drives and I have it set to mirror them. That gives me the equivalent of 500GB of data storage with the benefit of having the same data written on both drives should one drive fail.

Just a thought.
 
Vectis Birder said:
Hopefully once it's eventually finished doing its thing I can save all my photos and other gubbins on it and clear some space on my laptop! I can't see myself filling up 1 Terabyte in a hurry.
Click to expand...

Vectis,

You can always put fill it with your CD collection or download HD movies.


Happy computing,
Arthur Pinewood
 
Just got the new 500GB LaCie external drive already formatted for the Mac so thats good but it has a strange comment after formatting tips which reads

You cannot have multiple interfaces connected at the same time

anyone know what this means?
 
I thought when I got my iMac G5 with a 1 terabyte internal drive that I would be ok for a while too. Unfortunately for my storage I got the D3 soon afterwards (Nov 07) and the drive is already half full. I does have my cds on it too. I was saving in Tiff but now I've gone back to saving mostly in Jpeg except for the very special images.
I still back up onto DVD at the end of every month.
You can run Windows software on the new Intel macs which should enable you to read and write to windows drives.
Neil.
 
graham catley said:
on a similar theme I have 2x 500GB LaCie hard drives which I have 60% full of photos from my PC; having just bought a Mac I find that I can access the drives but I cannot write anything to them; comes up with a message along the lines of you do not have permission --so I cannot add photos to my library of folders that has taken me years to construct!--is this because they were formatted for Windows and the Mac cannot use that system or is there a more fundamental problem?
Click to expand...

Try something like Google's MacFuse to access the windows drive.

http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

Or install Windows as a VM on your Mac
 
Neil said:
I thought when I got my iMac G5 with a 1 terabyte internal drive that I would be ok for a while too. Unfortunately for my storage I got the D3 soon afterwards (Nov 07) and the drive is already half full. I does have my cds on it too. I was saving in Tiff but now I've gone back to saving mostly in Jpeg except for the very special images.
I still back up onto DVD at the end of every month.
You can run Windows software on the new Intel macs which should enable you to read and write to windows drives.
Neil.
Click to expand...


One thing that will help if you want to save your images as tiffs is to save them as compressed tiffs (using LZW compression). LZW compression is lossless, so there is no loss of detail each time the image is compressed or decompressed.

The JPEG format compresses the images as well, but the compression is lossy, and discrepancies are enhanced aroung linear features and boundaries. Also, every time you re-save a JPEG is it recompressed (in a lossy fashion) and the quality degrades. So if you edit your photos, try to minimize the number of saves.

I often save my photos in JPEG format because its easy. But if it really matters to me, then I go with compressed TIFFs.

Good Luck,
Kevin
 
thanks for the info--I put all pics onto the new 500GB and then erased the old one in about 15 seconds (scary really) and reformatted it for the Mac--now saving the pics back to the old 500GB----googled format hard drives and it came up with an Ausy UTube guide as to just how to do it on the Mac---useful old internet
 
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