It is hard to believe I am already feeling a bit cramped with nearly 2 TB (terabytes) of storage space. I imagine digital photographers of the future will be having 2 TB flash cards and look upon this as a joke like we often do when looking back at storing photos on a floppy disk. But as my photo archive grows and similarly the backups of that archive grow, it seems to disappear much faster than I expected. I can purchase some new hard drives to expand my NAS boxes, but it was a little bit cheaper for me to try out a Western Digital MyBook 500 GB. The one aspect of this drive that appealed to me in particular was that it was Firewire 800 compatible and that I had some extra space inside my computer to add a Firewire 800 card.
I know this souped up version of firewire is no cutting edge news (and there are probably even faster drives with SATA, etc), but I suppose I only recently understood just how fast it is, even on my now ancient Pentium 4 computer. If I may get a little geeky on you – I can transfer files to my USB2 drive or my NAS at about 24 MB/s (megabytes). My internal hard drives drives work in the neighborhood of 40-45 MB/s. A quick test on this MyBook drive is around 78 MB/s (read) / 57 MB/s (write). Not quite to the ‘rated speeds,’ but that seems pretty darn fast for an external drive and certainly a lot more than I am used to.

Since I was adding Firewire 800 capability, I also decided to get a Lexar Firewire 800 reader. I have yet to try this out yet, but I am expecting my flash card downloads aren’t going to be a start and walkaway event anymore. I can also connect the card reader directly to the back of this new hard drive because you can daisy-chain Firewire devices together – very convenient in trying to organize all this stuff on an already cluttered desk.

So if you are out shopping for more storage space for your images, give drives that offer Firewire 800 some serious consideration. (Note this is much different than Firewire 400 (1394a) – different cables, and much faster!) The one I purchased has very good reviews from multiple sources. Even if your computer doesn’t have a Firewire 800 (generic name 1394b) port – the cards to add some are very inexpensive and take 5 minutes to install inside your computer.

Now I just have to organize what I am going to put where..