These days external drives are becoming a more affordable option.You can get 2TB drives for less than 500 bucks. Connected with a Firewire or Thunderbolt cable, they can be very fast as well. There are plenty of options, however, I prefer to use Lacie drives. They are fast, reasonably priced and there after sales service is very good.
western_digital_fatbook.j
For TIC I have a 1TB internal drive. I back that up regularly to a 2TB external Lacie Quadra and then archive onto Blu-Ray disk (more on that shortly).
however can be slowed by large files such a video and photos. For basic NAS drives you can look at a QNAP TS-112, Buffalo’s LinkSTation, Western Digital’, My Book Live or Apple’s Time Capsule. Setting up a NAS drive can be a little tricky and I would advise talking to an IT provider if this is what you need. If your sick of having to delete movies and photos off your main internal hard drive then you may just need to look at extra storage and these days it’s not a big deal to drop in a second hard drive. This can also have a huge impact on your computers speed. There are plenty of good quality drives from Western Digital, Lacie, Seagate, Samsung or Hitachi. If you work with a lot of large files, look for a drive that runs at least at 7200RPM.
Portable external drives can be handy if you need to transfer or store large files from one computer to another.You must make sure you buy one that is built for the job, nice and robust that can handle being knocked around. USB drives are a handy way to boost your storage capacity and can’t be over looked.You can get 8 gigs for under $20 and these can be kept on your keyring to be accessed quickly.
Strategies. There is no getting around the fact that one day one of your disks will die. It’s happened to me more than once so I have learned from my painful mistakes. The wife still hasn't forgiven me for the loss of all our honeymoon photos. I don't have the balls to tell her about the Europe videos! For this reason you don't have to cram your entire digital content onto one drive. Use the technology at hand to give you peace of mind. I mentioned earlier that I archive onto Blu-Ray. This is our security blanket. I burn all of our important, can’t be lost files onto 25GB disks and store them off site. This is a good disaster strategy in case of massive failure, fire or theft. The most important thing about a back up strategy is you must have one no matter what.
d2‑Quadra Ref: Australian Macworld
lacie‑d2‑blu‑ray‑drive‑recorder TradeTalk 17