Internal or External Hard Drive???

[rpr]

I'm sure this is a stupid question, but here goes anyway.

I want to keep all my digital images on a hard drive devoted for that purpose. Years worth of irreplaceable digital family photos. I have nightmares thinking about that virus about 5-6 years ago that was spread by e-mail and changed the file extensions on all jpgs and bmps, rendering them all useless.

Is an external hard drive connected to a desktop PC by USB2 or firewire any more resistant to a virus/data corruption as compared to a second internal hard drive, assuming neither were used to store the OS???

 

[Tenchi4U]

Yes and no.

External hard drives should technically have a longer service life; b/c they are NOT always in use when a computer is on. If you have a quality enclosure & do NOT drop.abuse the hard drive it should last longer.

All of this is assuming you get a good hard drive to begin with, you could take 100 identical hard drives and a few could last 10 months and a few could last 10 years. For the most part, you are safe here as most modern hard drives are pretty reliable.

As far as viruses go, depending on the virus, some viruses are designed to destory data (sometimes specific data, pics, etc). So if you have a virus, it could possibly infect the external hard drive if that drive is on and connected. If you have a good antivirus solution though, you shouldn't be too worried about that (for a good FREE antivirus, try AVG Free edition; norton and mcafee aren't very good).

You could always catalogue your pics on DVD-R if you are REALLY paranoid; that medium is pretty reliable.

 

[nageov3t]

in terms of security, I'd rate them equal. the only real benefit to external over internal in this case is that you could instantly unplug it from your computer, rather than having to open up the case.

I'd go with an internal hard drive and regular cd/dvd backups. you really can't beat optical disk backups. I have an external hard drive that I use exclusively for backups once a month, but I still do dvd backups every couple months. cause wouldn't it suck if I fubared my entire system and my backup hard drive died between backups?

 

[corkyg]

I use an external Firewire drive solely for archiving pictures. It is never connected unless I have something to put on it. Further, all files archived on it are also burned onto CDs. I have several thousand images thus saved - am on my 5th digital camera and #6 is on order.

Viruses are not a big concern - I have three layers of protection - theye never make it to my computer - they are all caught on my POP server by Postini's SpamDam. (www.postini.com.)

My biggest problem has been XP SP2's woeful handling of external Firewire drives. All is OK - but it requires hot plugging - and that is not all bad.

Also, my external Firewire drive is duplicated so I have double redundancy.

 

[Davegod]

I would go with either the external drive, or an internal + DVD backups (externals tend to be more expensive anyway, so adding the dvd's wouldnt be all that much more expensive, plus you get extra functionality [dvd's for other uses, you can play photo-dvd's on tv players, can share the photos more easily]).

backing them up at first would be a pain, but it's just that once and then you're just talking about burning an occasional dvd with new pics.

 

[rpr]

Thanks for all the feedback. Since I already have a DVD burner, I'll probably go for the 160GB Maxtor internal Staples currently has on sale.

Corkyg: How does postini work? Do you subscribe to it or does your ISP???