external drives

buzzyb | 21:38 Sun 31st Oct 2010 | Computers

4 Answers

evening all,

I want to buy an external drive to store music (bout 1,000 CDs) and photos - I have no idea how many but we're looking at about 5 years worth.

Can anyone suggest what size drive I will need - will 250 gb be enough?

What about the make and price?

Someone told me the dearer drives are faster and the "quality" of the stored music and photos is better. Is that correct?

Maplins and Amazon advertise many different external drives of different size and price. How do you know which make and size to buy?

Many thanks - all advice is appreciated

B

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rojash

How many CDs you can store will depend on whether you store them as wav files, or compress them to mp3. Uncompressed, 1000 CDs is going to take between 600 and 700 GB, but mps will take much less depending on how much quality you are prepared to lose.

As hard disks are so cheap you might as well just go for a Terabyte (1000 GB), which should set you back about 45 quid.

"Someone told me the dearer drives are faster". The limiting factor with most external drives is the USB port, so any well-known brand (Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba) will return roughly the same performance.

"and the "quality" of the stored music and photos is better. Is that correct? "
No, it's total nonsense. The files are stored in binary form as 1s and 0s. There is no such thing as a better quality 1.

Hymie

If you want the CDs uncompressed, each 40 minute album will take up around 350MB – therefore 1,000 will need 350GB for the music.
Lets suppose you buy a 1TB drive and your photos are 5MB each – with 1,000 CDs on the drive, the drive will be full with 130,000 photos (which should be sufficient).
A 500GB drive would only allow for around 30,000 (5MB photos).

Other advice: if I downloaded 1,000 CDs and 5 years of photos to a dive (spent all that time doing it), I would buy a second drive as a backup, for when the inevitable happens.