Hard Drives

PORTABLE HARD DRIVES

Your portable hard drive is your “working drive.” This means it’s the drive that you bring to class, bring to the Lab, that you edit on, and that travels with you.

In general, we recommend that you shop for portable drives with the following features:

  1. Have multiple ports or interfaces (USB or Thunderbolt; most newer Macs support both Thunderbolt and USB, however, you can get adapters for Firewire cables if your drive also has those ports)
  2. Are at least 1TB in size
  3. Are compatible with Macs (if you use a Windows machine at home, than one that is Mac/Windows compatible)

We also recommend G-Raid, Western Digital, Seagate, and LaCie brand drives and that you purchase a case for your portable drive.

Some recommended portable drives:

You can also look for portable drives locally. Some suggested retailers include The Duck Store, Costco, Best Buy, Staples, Office Max, while online retailers include B&H, Amazon, and Newegg.

Cases: 

Some drives come with a case. When shopping for a case look for one with a hard exterior shell and a way to strap down the drive inside and hold your cable. Make sure that the interior dimensions of the case will hold the exterior dimensions of the drive.

Here are some case options on B&H.

DESKTOP DRIVES

While the portable drive is used for working and editing, we strongly recommend that students have a larger desktop drive for backing up files and projects. This device is primarily for storing and backing up data and can be used to back up all your files (i.e. music, photos, documents, etc.); however, you can use this drive to work from at home if you choose. Most of these drives have fans and require external power through a plug.

  1. Have multiple ports or interfaces (USB or Thunderbolt; most newer Macs support both Thunderbolt and USB, however, you can get adapters for Firewire cables if your drive also has those ports)
  2. Are at least 2TB in size
  3. Are compatible with Macs (if you use a Windows machine at home, than one that is Mac/Windows compatible)
  4. If you’re a Mac user, find a drive that will work with Time Machine (Mac’s OS backup system).

We also recommend G-Raid, Western Digital, and LaCie brand drives and that you purchase a case for your portable drive.

Some recommended desktop drives:

This page was written by Andre´ Sirois for the University of Oregon Cinema Studies Program and is published under Creative Commons license (CC BY NC SA 3.0)

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