One of the great, unspoken challenges of digital photography is handling the ever-growing collection of photos piling up in your computer's hard drive. Your computer's an obvious destination for photos but it can't be their last stop. If you don't make some kind of back-up, you stand to lose your entire collection in one catastrophic swoop.
Obviously, external hard drives are an excellent way to back those images up. Western Digital
is out with a new line of Mac-based My Book Studio drives which can certainly do the trick. The new drives (in 500GB, 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB capacities) offer a novel feature: an e-paper display. According to Western Digital, the display acts much like a Kindle in that it continues to provide data about the drive (remaining capacity, etc.) even when the power is off. You can use the display to create your own label for the drive as well.
There's also password protection and the company's SmartWare software which provides for real-time archiving of data. If your Mac supports Apple's
TimeMachine service, the drives work with that as well.
Most home users would be content with a 500GB drive - that can store tens of thousands of photos and over 60 hours of HD video footage. Of course, when it comes to storage, it's best to have too much rather than too little. Prices start at $149.
Print | posted @ Monday, October 19, 2009 8:10 AM