Digital Storage - Never Enough! - Wild Texas Forums: Parks, Travel & Recreation

Shannon · 01-26-2004, 06:36 PM

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/0...ers/index.html

This is a great article on NASA's twin Mars rovers, but what really caught my eye was the following comment (located about 3/4 of the way down into the article):

Quote:

After several days of attempts, though, the scientists made contact and persuaded Spirit to send data. What they got wasn't much -- and initially gave researchers an erroneous date of 2053.

Trosper said the problem appeared to be that the rover's flash memory couldn't handle the number of files it was storing. The jam-up, she said, apparently kept Spirit from shutting down properly and performing a number
of functions that normally originated in its flash memory.

Digital photographers, this is further proof that you can never buy too much storage for your photos!
:cool:

Shannon · 03-26-2004, 01:41 PM

The add-on to this is that digital photographers as a whole, and myself and Justin in particular, need to learn to be just as selective about the images we keep as traditional (negative and slide film photographers) have been about throwing away all but their very best work. Being a web designer & developer in addition to a photographer is a pain, though, because images I know are never going to be published because they are inferior (poor composition, not sharp enough, bad depth of field, etc.) are still sometimes useful as basic illustration shots for a free informational website like WildTexas.com. So I find myself looking at thousands upon thousands of our photos and thinking, "I could use that. I could use that. I could use that." Ahem.... so we have a serious storage space challenge, and keep shooting more photos making it only worse.

That said, the savings we make by not shooting print or slide film and having to pay for processing, duplicating and scanning still greatly exceed the costs of ever-greater hard drives to store our digital work. My brother mentioned to me the other day that a 120GB hard drive (generally about $100 retail or so) was on a one day sale for $60 recently! Amazing, considering Justin's first SCSI ("Small Computer Serial Interface", as opposed to the cheaper and more common IDE) hard drive for his old Commodore Amiga 500 cost over $800 in the late 1980's* and it was a paltry 10 or 20 megabytes, total.

*Yes, I knew him even back then -- we met online.

10-19-2004, 12:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shannon

The add-on to this is that digital photographers as a whole, and myself and Justin in particular, need to learn to be just as selective about the images we keep as traditional (negative and slide film photographers) have been about throwing away all but their very best work. Being a web designer & developer in addition to a photographer is a pain, though, because images I know are never going to be published because they are inferior (poor composition, not sharp enough, bad depth of field, etc.) are still sometimes useful as basic illustration shots for a free informational website like WildTexas.com. So I find myself looking at thousands upon thousands of our photos and thinking, "I could use that. I could use that. I could use that." Ahem.... so we have a serious storage space challenge, and keep shooting more photos making it only worse.

That said, the savings we make by not shooting print or slide film and having to pay for processing, duplicating and scanning still greatly exceed the costs of ever-greater hard drives to store our digital work. My brother mentioned to me the other day that a 120GB hard drive (generally about $100 retail or so) was on a one day sale for $60 recently! Amazing, considering Justin's first SCSI ("Small Computer Serial Interface", as opposed to the cheaper and more common IDE) hard drive for his old Commodore Amiga 500 cost over $800 in the late 1980's* and it was a paltry 10 or 20 megabytes, total.

*Yes, I knew him even back then -- we met online.

But CD-Rs are cheap! Back the photos up on a couple of those.Even with large images - you can still back those up and catalog them more easily on CD-rs or even DVD size burning.....

Bats
SA. TX

Shannon · 10-19-2004, 10:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Batlise

But CD-Rs are cheap! Back the photos up on a couple of those.Even with large images - you can still back those up and catalog them more easily on CD-rs or even DVD size burning.....

Bats
SA. TX

If you have enough photos to fill up 99 gigabytes (which is roughly how many we had, when I wrote that original post) -- you have way too many photos to just burn to "a couple of CDRs".

We burn to DVD but for an immense amount of photos (or videos, data files, etc.) you really do need larger hard disk drives -- otherwise, you spend your whole life figuring out what to burn to DVD and no time out taking photos or filling orders!

Also, CDs and DVDs have not been around nearly as long as hard disk technology and the jury is still out in some circles as to how truly "archival" CDs and DVDs are. For that reason, we always have a large chunk of our stuff on hard disk drives -- as well as burned to a disc-based medium.

10-19-2004, 11:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shannon

If you have enough photos to fill up 99 gigabytes (which is roughly how many we had, when I wrote that original post) -- you have way too many photos to just burn to "a couple of CDRs".

We burn to DVD but for an immense amount of photos (or videos, data files, etc.) you really do need larger hard disk drives -- otherwise, you spend your whole life figuring out what to burn to DVD and no time out taking photos or filling orders!

Also, CDs and DVDs have not been around nearly as long as hard disk technology and the jury is still out in some circles as to how truly "archival" CDs and DVDs are. For that reason, we always have a large chunk of our stuff on hard disk drives -- as well as burned to a disc-based medium.

Sorry - I just joined yesterday. I also found a 40 gig storage thing for photos on EBAY. It was around $ 200. I got it so I could take all the digital photos I want and not drag my lap top around on vacation. I'll tell you about it if you like....

Bats

10-24-2004, 10:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Batlise

Sorry - I just joined yesterday. I also found a 40 gig storage thing for photos on EBAY. It was around $ 200. I got it so I could take all the digital photos I want and not drag my lap top around on vacation. I'll tell you about it if you like....

Bats

I found that the new X-Drive vp-3310 was a great investment. It's has a hard drive and slots for all popular digital media types. It also doubles up as an MP3 player. This is a better deal than the VP-300 that's out there because the VP-300 doesn't have a backlit LCD. There are some even cheaper X-drives that don't include the extra features like LCD or MP3 playing. We figured that it's better to go all out with this one.

If you play your cards right you can get a lot of storage for little money. We got this VP-3310 with 60GB HD for less than $200. I did it by buying the cheapest VP-3310 unit WITHOUT a hard drive. I had found it for about $90 shipped somewhere. Then I looked for the best 60GB laptop HD for the money. We ended up buying one for about $90. In the end we got a 60GB X-drive for $180. They retail for about $300 for the 60GB model, so it was well worth it. Even if you're not a PC expert I suggest you buy the parts seperately. To install the HD all you do is unscrew 2 screws on the housing, plug in the hard drive, secure it with 4 screws, then screw the housing back on. Then you run their software and it will take care of formatting the drive for compatibility. It was very simple and well worth the $100+ savings.

Similar Threads