Saturday, May 3, 2008

External Hard Disk-To Store Movies-Part 02

In my previous post I had written about the disadvantages of using optical discs to store your data. They can be summarised as follows:

  1. Searching the Disc for a particular movie
  2. Sorting long after you have got the movie.
  3. More physical space required.
  4. Lack of flexibility in terms of storing a certain amount of data.
  5. Scratching of discs
  6. Expensive re-writable discs.

Keeping all these things in mind, it's better to go in for an External Hard Disc. I would prefer a 1TB (Tera Byte = 1000 GB, Giga Byte) hard disc. Because assuming a movie takes about 1 GB on an average, I can still store about 1000 movies on this. However, I have to be content with a 500GB Hard Disk for now. These are actually pretty cheap compared to their prices a few years back. A 500 GB Hard Disk costs about 125 USD. (Here in India) That's alright. Of course, certain brands cost more and there are also some drives which have an inbuilt Ethernet port. Such discs are obviously expected to cost more than the conventional Hard Disks even if it means that you will be losing some functionality.

Another option is to buy a Hard Disk and then buy an external casing. But then you won't save much doing this and moreover the quality and also the finish of the casing might not be great. So it's always better to go in for proper External Hard Discs. I'll post here once I have made a choice of Hard Disk and also bought one.