Amazon's killer deal on hard drives

July 11, 2011 @ 7:30AM

Amazon's killer deal on hard drives

At 4 cents per gigabyte, there's no excuse for not having your photos backed up!

By Haje Jan Kamps

I know I keep rambling on about the importance of backing up your photos (I did an extensive article on the topic earlier this year, which discusses the 'how' and 'when' in detail), but one of the main reasons people don't do proper backups is that external drives are perceived to be so expensive.

Today, I stumbled across a deal that is so bloody awesome I simply have to share it with you guys; Amazon's doing a 3TB external USB 2.0 drive by Western Digital for under $130, or you could opt for a slightly cheaper less-capacity version of the same drive.

Here's a crazy thought experiment: I used to pay 12 Norwegian kroner ($2.22 in today's exchange rate) for a 1.44mb floppy disk. If this drive had cost the same per megabyte as what I used to pay for floppies, it would cost more than 4.6 million dollars... And they still say 'everything used to be better'!

Remember: It's always a good idea to replace your back-up drives every year. I've ordered mine already, so what are you waiting for?

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Comments

PHENAOS

10 months ago

True, no excuse not to back up, but there is never an excuse to be cheap about back ups. I've never had a good experience with WD. Their enclosures seem cheaply built, are slow to respond, and most of the time are software not hardware RAIDs. I'd pay twice as much for reliability and piece of mind, not half as much for a POS. Granted I'm doing mostly video and motion graphics, which is far more taxing on a HD, but I still do a fair amount of still work, and I WOULD NOT roll the dice unless it's an enterprise level WD drive.

I've used Lacie, G-Drives, and CalDigit drives extensively with no problems (for stills, video, rendering). Granted all HDs can fail regardless of the manufactures reputation, but the aforementioned have the Drives and the Hardware to match. WD seems to take the cheaper software route, and I've had nothing but headaches with them.

Take it with a grain of salt cause I am sure there's several people that can say the same thing about Lacie, G-Drives and Caldigit. But for me, if some one gave me a WD drive, it would be on craigslist in a second. It's just not worth the risk.

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About Me

Haje Jan Kamps

Haje is an author and editor of photography books: Always hunting for the perfect photo, or the most eloquent way of explaining why he didn't quite manage to capture the photo he wanted, but could have if he had tried harder.

When he was 16 years old, Haje discovered that there ... View Profile »