DSLR Photography Forum

Now that my wife is studying part time, she almost exclusively works on the desktop PC at home, leaving me with my work laptop to use.

Problem is, all my photos are on my desktop PC, and I don't want to have duplicate copies lying around all over the place.

Do you think a External USB drive would be a good idea for a "central repository" for photos, so I can just access all the photos in once place, and take the drive with me to whatever computer I'm working on? Any problems with reliability?


Or should I stop being a geek and just make it a network drive, and work off that? I won't have my photos with me when I'm not in the house though...


Any suggestions?

I've had my external Buslink drive for two years with absolutely no mechanical problems. It was a bit of a pain to set up on my old PC with Win-98, but with Win-XP it was plug-and-play. That means it should be highly portable from desktop to laptop if you've got XP on both.

Your other choice would be to set up a wireless network arrangement; you can leave the photos where they are, share the folder where they are stored, and open them on the laptop when you want to edit them. Then you don't have to move the drive around with you.

Better arrangement would be to use both. You'd get the convenience of the wireless network, and when your wife crashes the desktop's hard drive, the photos are safe on the external drive.

P.S. The wireless gear prices have really plunged! An 802.11g router and 54mbps laptop card should each run less than US$50.

I use an external HDD with USB 2 / Firewire connection to store all my photos.

Wow, that's cheap, slej!

I've already got a wireless network at home, so yeah - mebbe I'll just do that for the time being.

Still interested in a external HDD though... perhaps for backup purposes

The external cases with both Firewire and USB 2.0 are only $100-120 and a 80Gig can be had for less than $100.

I have a X's drive with a 40Gig drive that I can also use or I write to a CD or DVD re-writeable to use on another PC.

Hey Pete, how fast is the down/upload to the X's drive, compared to a standard external USB2 hard drive?

It uses a 5,400rpm laptop drive, that is the faster of the available drives, the slower ones ar 4,200rpm.

Certainly not that much slower.

Just did a quick test and it took one minute and twelve seconds to transfer 254megs of images to the drive and about three seconds to delete them.