External Hard Drives (for Digital Nomads)

what exactly are the scenarios where you'd need an external drive? any reason why you couldn't simply carry more SD cards or the like? SD cards are crazy light, and more robust then a spinning drive.

while i was trekking in asia for 4 months i carried a netbook and two redundant small western digital passport hard drives, and just tried to be careful as possible with them. worked like a charm, but i'd never consider taking something like that in the backcountry. always left them at hostels and used them when i returned.

What are your storage needs? Will you have a laptop or is this for photo backup?

SSD’s are the most reliable and use less power to run. G-Tech used to carry a ssd drive that often gets recommended. Some flash/thumb drives are over 64GB. They are slightly cheaper than a ssd, smaller and lighter too.

EDIT: For backing up SD/CF cards I bought a refurbished Hyperdrive Colorspace O. There are newer models that will cost more but have more storage and/or features. Hyperdrive

Before you go too far down that road, chasing grams, you also want to think about the power requirements. If some drive requires three pounds of batteries, then you need to change your thinking.

You have two categories, rotating hard disk drives and solid-state (semiconductor) drives. Solid-state drives tend to use flash memory, so the power requirement is very low, but the access time is slow. Hard disk drives require much more power at spin-up, but the access time is fast. You also have to decide how much capacity you need, e.g. 64GB or whatever. Hard disk drives can be huge, at least according to Donald Trump.

–B.G.–

What are you going to use it for?

There are a couple options for backups, a "Cloud" service or a Flash drive. Flash drives are getting to be high capacity, over 100 GB.

I'm using a macbook air with only 256GB of storage. For what I do, I need much more than that. SD cards aren't practical for my purposes.

With the price of 64GB USB flash drives being under $60 and 32GB SD card being under $32 I don't even deal with portable hard drives anymore. I recently went through my 2TB drive and cut everything down that I really want to keep to fit easily on a 32GB and 64GB USB Flash drives and one 32GB SD card. That paired with a non activated Droid Incredible phone or a 7" tablet pretty much lets me do whatever I want wherever I want to go.

You also have to remember that regular hard drives don't like to bounce around or be dropped. The SSD ones are much better for impact but Flash is way cheaper and just as durable to impact.

That and you can always go into any library and use a computer to move your data around.

You can pick up a USB drive DVD burner and burn the files. Much safer than a HDD.

Yeah the 2.5" drives for 500 GB and 1TB are okay priced but still have the same need of not wanting to be bounced around dropped.

What are you doing that needs so much space? If you can just stick everything you need on a big portable 3.5" and keep it in your car. Just take it out at a coffee shop and plug it in to transfer what you need for the next bit. These still do not like a whole bunch of shaking either but are better than 2.5".

what exactly are your requirements? vague questions get vague answers.

I am looking for around 500GB – 1TB.

"What are you doing that needs so much space?"

Hmm… might want to apply some UL thinking to your storage :) I have over 500 GB of backup storage, but a lot of it is business files that I do not need when traveling… actually I rarely need it. I have a TON of stuff on my laptop at about 130 GB, and many gigabytes are for programs and operating files, nothing I am going to be moving around.

32GB and 64GB flash drives are getting pretty cheap. I have a 128GB that I travel with, but it is fairly expensive.

i still have no idea what your needs are. is this for backcountry use? international travel? what EXACTLY are you trying to do, what do you need this storage to do?

is it for backing up video files while traveling? what?

For quite a few hobbies, actually. Video editing, music recording (some of my programs have HUGE sound libraries), photography (yes, I shoot in RAW).

Not so much for the backcountry this time, more so for travel.

I have no 10-year-old digital media I can still access and have had some hard drives crash unretrievably. Yet everything I've posted to facebook, flickr or emailed myself at gmail.com is still there. And 50- and 100-year-old paper photographs are still in the family.

So I email myself the best shot I took each day. If I lose all the rest, my friends back home will benefit from a properly editted photo collection.

With free pixels, many people employ the "Mongolian Horde Principle" of photograph – taking enough photos will trump skill and consideration.

Compose and shoot like you're using silver-salt emulsions on glass plates and everything will (1) look better and (2) fit on any memory card.

For video editing, you need a fast processor and fast disk access. That probably forces you back toward some conventional hard disk drive.

–B.G.–

Are you going to be on foot or with a car? Your best bet is to just take a huge full size external with you and copy things to it and work off of it. I hope you have USB 3.0 because otherwise everything takes forever. You really can't do full video, RAW and audio with all of the libraries on the fly for long period of time and be portable less than a 1U rack mounted system. The tech is just not there yet.

I plan to be 'on the road' for a while.. urban backpacking if you will.. and I was thinking that any projects that I am currently working on I can move to the SSD in the Macbook Air. Put them on the external when finished.

Laptop HDD's in a generic enclosure via USB are small and lighter. A dock like the Blacx lets you do either size drive and e-sata as well. Read reviews at Newegg as to failure of various drives and pick what sounds good to you. Prices are up with the flooding in Thailand.

I guess it depends on where you're traveling. If traveling where there is ample free wifi (in the US), then I'd use dropbox or a similar service and not carry an external hard drive. If traveling where there isn't ample free wifi (Europe) then I'd use a Seagate Goflex drive. It's not the lightest you can get but it works well and isn't the priciest either. They nice thing about the GoFlex drives is that the connector is interchangeable, so you can use a Firewire 800 connector, or replace that with a USB 3.0 connector, or, soon, a Thunderbolt connector. Since the drive isn't built to take full advantage of the Thunderbolt connector, it'll perform like a Firewire 800 drive (which ain't too shabby and is the only way you'll get that performance directly on a newer Macbook Air).

And I'm either not understanding Bob or disagreeing with him – current SSDs are faster than 'normal' platter drives (often by quite a bit), consume less power, and, theoretically, should last longer. They're certainly more durable in the short term. There are external SSD drives, which should be lighter than their platter cousins, but they're still much more expensive than platters.

Depending on how soon you need it and what year Macbook Air you have, a few companies are coming out with external SSD drives with a Thunderbolt port. These should be blazing fast, fairly light, and exceptionally expensive. One company, OCZ, is supposed to come out with one up to 1TB.

Elgato (of eyeTV fame) has an external Thunderbolt SSD drive. It's $800 for a 240GB drive and weighs 9.5 oz. (240 grams). Reported to be available this month.

"With free pixels, many people employ the "Mongolian Horde Principle" of photograph – taking enough photos will trump skill and consideration.

Compose and shoot like you're using silver-salt emulsions on glass plates and everything will (1) look better and (2) fit on any memory card."

That is so true. My wife took some 2500 pictures on our 1 week family vacation in Asheville last year. Mostly it was 6-10 shots of the same exact thing. You get so many that is makes the management of the data unreasonable and you end up just mass deleting things because nobody has time to go through each shot one by one and figure out which is the best. Silly.

As far as what disk drive I would trust…none of them. Every single external hard drive I have ever owned has failed. I use dropbox and GoogleDocs now.

I definatly would go solid state drive of some kind. With a conventional hard drive you don't stand a chance IMHO.

8, 16, 32, 64GB flash drives are on sale at so many box stores that there is no reason to pay full price for these. I carry a couple loaded with pictures to use to help sell printers at my part-time job, and have put these through the washing machine at least six times. They air dry overnight and still work.

Jumped in late, but really, just how much data capacity do you need while "nomading"? USB flash drives have been talked about. But don't forget SD cards and microSD cards that go up to 32 GB.

You can buy a "card reader" that looks and shapes like a small USB drive — but allows you to stick in an SD or microSD card, which you can then stick into the USB slot of any computer. Why microSD cards? Because they are tiny and near weightless, and most likely used by your phone already. It can be a good thing using just one type of storage for all your data needs on phone, camera, laptop, and desktop.

"But don't forget SD cards and microSD cards that go up to 32 GB."

Actually, SD cards now go up to 128GB. Expensive, but available. If you've got the 13" Macbook Air, it's got an SD card slot built in, you don't even need a separate reader.