With Laptops now having 4GB + RAM and fitted with 512MB fast ram Graphics cards they are as powerful as last years top spec desktop so you need the HDD's to match.
As I have been spending more time away from the home/studio, I have had to rethink my use of laptop and storage I wrote about one portable HD option in the "1TB Floppy" a few months ago (July 09)
http://www.rpsforum.org/showthread.php?t=16042
Well the downsides are that you have to protect the bare drives (VHS cases can be mod 'ed to work) and the dock is quite bulky and needs its own power supply.
So I was thinking of just getting another 500MB FW ruggedised drive or a USB one so at least I had a back up copy of images shot when away from studio.
You can imagine my delight when I spotted a 1TB ruggedised drive with eSATA and USB connectors at only £108 I thought I was onto a bargain, but it was a bit of a surprise when it arrived, being slightly larger than the scale less picture on the net implied.
You can see it under a 500MB drive the 500 uses 2.5" hard drive buss powered from the laptop, whereas the 1TB is 3.5" HDD form so much bigger and heavier and needs an external power supply.
But it works and means that with my existing SATA ExpressCard|34 connector I have in effect increased the working and storage space on my laptop to over 1TB at considerably less cost than having a new HDD fitted
But it's more of a Hotel room use HDD rather than 'in the field' or Pub.
It takes up less space than the dock and bare drives however I still can only backup 450GB as I am limited by the capacity of the 500GB unit if I am to have two copies on separate drives!
Since I started this page I have partitioned this drive to give me a 700GB Virtual HDD and a 230GB HDD the latter contains a Bootable Clone of the Laptop's Internal Drive as added security ref the page on Cloning.
This leaves me with a 700GB backup/working Drive and a 500GB FW800 drive .
My max raw file sizes at the moment are ~ 60MB Hasselblad RAW files and taking 450GB as my limit that gives me space for 7500 images on the FW unit and duplicate on the eSATA unit I could purchase another 1TB unit which will push the back up storage to approximately 15,000 images on each drive more than adequate
No doubt a buss powered 2.5" 1TB or even SDD's that don't require a mortgage will be available shortly.
I think I can live with the size for the time being.
