Camera Labs

My pc is about 4 years old now, and has only a 32g disk drive. I'm almost out of space and am looking for a quick fix.
Currently I have a 320gb passport usb drive to back up my stuff. I just manually drag and drop. No backup software.

I'm thinking of getting the world book mirror edition, probably just a 1T.
thinking of using it in raid1 mirroring capacity.

My idea is that for now, until I get a new pc in a year or two, I can drag my photos to the WD device, freeing up space on my internal disk, and operate on my photos directly from the WD. I have heard it won't really be too slow to work on. If it is, I can load my new pics from my camera to my internal, work on them there, then drag them to the WD.

So my 2 questions are:
1) Does this sound reasonable ?

2) The reviews of the WD mirror keep mentioning the backup software. But my idea is that raid1 means that everything I put on the main drive will automatically be also put on the mirror drive, which makes backups unecessary. I shouldn't need the backup software for anything I store on it. Just put files there and don't worry about it. If the drive fails, I can just turn the mirror into the primary and get a replacement, which will safely re-mirror when installed.
Is this all right ?

Thanks in advance.

Floyd

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Peace,
Floyd

At 32GB this disk will most likely be a (P)ATA drive and your computer might not support SATA, or RAID. The nice thing about hard drives though is you can use them in a later computer too. If you make a little investment in new disks now, solving your storage shortage, you can still use them in a newer computer later on. This works best of course if you build your own computer.

You should consider buying two SATA disks, probably 640GB or 1TB, and a fairly straightforward PCI SATA RAID card. Place them in RAID 1 for basic protection against a failing drive and then you could even use the old 32GB drive in an external enclosure for back ups of your photos for the time being. Or buy an additional 1-2TB external drive for back ups

Later when you buy a new computer you can move the RAID array to the new system. It's an investment that is 'future proof'.

Ben
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When in doubt..... Press the shutter.

Thanks.
What I wound up doing, at least for now, is I bought a 500gb sata drive at a good price and stuck it in my PC.
now I am using windows backups to backup the my pictures folder to a usb drive, with a weekly full and daily incrementals.
Seems to be safe. I would have to have 2 drives fail simultaneously for me to lose my data.

I may consider writing my pics off to a cd-rom periodically now too.

_________________
Peace,
Floyd