New hard drive makes noticeable difference

[Jolieteddie]

Decided last week to upgrade the hard drive in my 3-year old Toshiba laptop running Vista with 2Gb ram. Put in a 500Gb 7200 rpm drive to replace the original 200GB 5400rpm. The new faster drive has noticeably made the machine quicker on start-up and when loading large RAW photo files or starting up both LR3 and PSE. I did this mainly to accommodate my growing catalog of photographs and I knew that the speedier drive would be a good move, but I am very pleased with the performance bump. I back up with both external drives and burn DVDs. Good 2.5" laptop drives can be had for <$80 so I think that the upgrade was worth the cost. I probably have given the laptop at least another 2-3 years of useful life. I used cloning software to transfer my old drive to the new one. Painless. Just a thought for those of you running older machines that have slowed down a bit.

[rotay44]

Don't throw that old drive away. You can get a simple gizmo that will connect the old drive via the USB connection and you have a useful back up drive available.

I presume you did something like when you said you used "cloning software".

For readers who don't know how to do this, type "SATA to USB" into your favourite search engine for a whole range of products.

Also important to remember is that even if you deleted sensitive files from a hard drive before you scrapped it, those files are still there and accessible. Last week I used a free file recovery tool to search an old hard drive which held 3 vital JPEG files essential for a court case relating to an accident. I recovered 17,000 deleted files before I found the photos. Use a "file shredder" to destroy files, or better, drill a few holes through the old hard drive disk before you scrap it.

[Jolieteddie]

I simply bought a "hard drive" upgrade kit that had the software and an external USB drive enclosure. The upgrade kit had clear instructions for those (like me) who had not done this sort of upgrade before. I bought the drive separately, since I wanted to select one that seemed to have good reviews. It was a Hitachi. I have three external hard drives with Hitachi disks, which have proven to be durable.

So, indeed, I have the old hard drive safely tucked away as a "snapshot" back up of my laptop. I should be able to update that drive should I substantially change the software installed on the laptop after this switch. At the very worst I could simply reinstall the old drive and the laptop would restart setup as it was when I made the switch (last Friday evening).

What this upgrade has allowed me to do is create a clearer back-up strategy: photos on the laptop with 2+ back ups on external media. With the older drive I was having to move photos (and other files) off to external storage/back up since it was filling up fast. I had let my various back ups get all scattered about on the several external drives. Not good.

So the new 500 gb, even with all my photo, movie, and data files loaded back on it still has more free space available than the old drive had total. Nice. I figure that I have 2+ years or so of photography and other work before this 500gb fills up too. By then I will most likely be ready for a new machine anyway.

[rotay44]

That's exactly the kind of information we like here, as storing and organising our photos are as important as taking them in the first place.

A level of security on top of your scheme would be to store backups (monthly on dvd maybe) in a physically seperate location. In case of fire, flood, robbery etc, you'd have saved your library.

- Roy

[WD0P]

Amazing. I just recently performed the same upgrade on my Dell Inspiron laptop....along with a memory upgrade to 4 gHz. My 500 gb HDD is also the 7200 RPM model with larger cache than the original drive. I've also noticed the increase in quickness. I purchased a little case and USB interface from Micro Center here in the Kansas City area for less than $10 and mounted the old 250 gb drive in it. Very handy and compact. It fits in a pocket of my laptop carrying case very nicely. So now I have extra storage capacity with me everywhere I go.....or, alternately, I can keep it in another bag or somewhere else in the car.....just in case someone successfully snatches my laptop.

Roy is right on target with the advice about keeping backups of your images in other locations.

[Jolieteddie]

Yes, I have most but not all recent photos burned to DVD. That's next on my to-do list. Of course, DVD shelf-life is really unknown, too. More disturbingly, recently I tried to access one DVD that I had burned within the past year of back up photos (copies already on two back up drives, thankfully) and it gave me an error message. Unreadable, although others burned at the same time, the same way are fine. So DVDs ain't no more trustworthy than external drives...in fact (knock on wood) every single one of my four external hd drives are still good to go.

The issue of "out of the house" storage is important. I need to start storing one set of my photos elsewhere (work?).

[ArthurIhde]

yes,i have the same opinion

[CarolM]

Upgrading hard drive storage could be hard and expensive. However, today, there is new way to do it using sodium chloride, or simply known as salt. With a touch of chemical-grade table salt, hard drive capacity could be sextupled, this is according to a group of scientists from Singapore's Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE). Without the use of costly gear, Dr. Joel Yang and team discovered that clustering info on the nanoscopic level through the use of sodium chloride made much higher storage space resolutions possible, and hence greater storage capability. Source of article: Discovery: Hard drive space can be sextupled with table salt.