User Storage Down

Our User Storage drive has crashed, so the files on it are currently unavailable. We are hoping to have it working again next week, but we can't make any guarantees. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you. Please let us know if you have any specific concerns we can help to address.

Buying a Hard Drive

Let's talk hard drives. If you're working on a project in Photoshop, or Illustrator, or Dreamweaver, or even GarageBand, a USB flash/thumb drive is probably all you'll need to transfer your files, or back them up. But if you're working on a video project in the lab--especially one that will take more than about a week to finish, we strongly encourage you to buy a portable hard drive to save your files onto. You should expect to use about 13GB per hour of standard, DV video and 40-50GB per hour of HD video.

There are 2 types of hard drive to consider:

1) There are the tiny portable ones, that fit in your pocket or almost into the palm of your hand, and only require a USB or Firewire cable to connect them to your computer. These tend to be in the 160 GB to 1TB (1000GB) range for $60-$200 depending on what brand you get and where you buy it. They're extremely convenient, and if you don't mind paying a premium for their extra portability, they're probably the best option. Other than price, the disadvantage of these drives is that they're a little slower (usually 5400 rpm), and for that reason you wouldn't want to edit video directly from them. Generally, you'd work on your video project on the machine's main hard drive, and then copy it back to your portable drive when you're ready to move it or back it up.

2) There are the bulkier, heavier drives that tend to be a couple inches thick, and require you to plug them into a wall outlet in addition to connecting them to your computer via USB/Firewire. They tend to range 500GB-2TB for $70-$200, so you get a lot more bang for your buck, but you can't just throw them in your pocket, and you need an electrical outlet to use them. If you want to edit video directly from the drive, be sure to get a fast one (7200 rpm or more).

You can find refurbished hard drives a little cheaper, but in my opinion, it's not worth risking your data just to save a few bucks.

You can buy both types of drives at:

• The Computer Connection (on campus, located at the NW corner of the Penn Bookstore. More expensive, but more convenient. Tell them we sent you. It won't save you any money, but it makes us look good.)
• Amazon.com
• Buy.com
• Newegg
• TigerDirect

Even cheaper hard drive

This is almost getting ridiculous, how cheap these things are. Buy.com has a 640GB hard drive for only $66.99 with free shipping. That's TEN CENTS per Gigabyte. That is a CRAZY price for one of the portable drives. I just bought one of the 400GB drives for the same price last week! And *THAT* is still a good price. It's USB only, meaning it doesn't require a power cable at all.

Those of you with large video files should strongly consider getting one of these babies. It should last you your entire time at college, and you can just throw it in your bookbag and go. If nothing else, it's a great backup drive. Most of you will be able to backup your entire laptop several times over on a drive this size.

http://www.buy.com/prod/western-digital-elements-640gb-usb-2-0-external-hard-drive-black/q/loc/101/209389534.html?adid=17653&dcaid=17653

8GB USB Flash Drive cheap!

People often come into the lab with tiny little USB keys/flash drives/etc. By "tiny" I mean 256MB or 512MB. That's not even as much data as a CD holds! I don't think they even make them that small anymore. Time to upgrade, people!

Way back in February, I posted an item about a 4GB USB flash drive for only $17. Well guess what. Now the 8GB flash drive is the same price--with free shipping! 8GB is almost 2 DVD's worth of data, more than enough to hold thousands of photos or MP3s. It'll even hold a decent amount of video. I just ordered one for myself. Check it out at Buy.com. The 4GB is now only $12, but you don't get as much bang for your buck as you do with the 8GB.

Portable Hard Drives

Let's talk hard drives. If you're working on a project in Photoshop, or Illustrator, or Dreamweaver, or even GarageBand, a USB flash/thumb drive is probably all you'll need to transfer your files, or back them up. But if you're working on a video project in the lab that will take more than about a week to finish, we strongly encourage you to buy a portable hard drive to save your files onto. You should expect to use about 13GB per hour of standard, DV video and 40-50GB per hour of HD video.

There are 2 types of hard drive to consider:

1) There are the tiny portable ones, that fit in your pocket or almost into the palm of your hand, and only require a USB or Firewire cable to connect them to your computer. These tend to be in the 100GB-200GB range for $75-$150 depending on what brand you get and where you buy it. They're extremely convenient, and if you don't mind paying a premium for their extra portability, they're probably the best option.

2) There are the bulkier, heavier drives that tend to be a couple inches thick, and require you to plug them into a wall outlet in addition to connecting them to your computer via USB/Firewire. They tend to range 300GB-750GB for $100-$200, so you get a lot more bang for your buck, but you can't just throw them in your pocket, and you need an electrical outlet to use them.

You can find refurbished hard drives a little cheaper, but in my opinion, it's not worth risking your data just to save a few bucks.

You can buy both types of drives at:

• The Computer Connection (on campus, located at the NW corner of the Penn Bookstore. Tell them we sent you. It won't save you any money, but it makes us look good.)
• Amazon.com
• Buy.com
• Newegg
• TigerDirect

Three Days

Although we would love to be able to store all of everyone's files forever and ever, we just don't have the storage space to be able to handle it all. So we have a policy that we will store your files on our networked hard drive for up to 3 days. And if you come back during that time and work on them some more, we'll keep them for an additional 3 days. And so on. And so forth. Etc. Etc.

Until now, we've managed to be pretty liberal with this policy, deleting files only when we run out of space, and we've kept files for weeks, or even months past the promised 3 days. But recently we've seen an explosion in the use of Hi Definition video in the lab, which takes exponentially more room than plain old DV video. Anywhere from 40-50GB per hour, in fact, compared to the 13GB per hour for standard video. So our User Storage drive is filling up much faster these days, and we've been forced to start following our deletion policy much more strictly. (Today, for example, I deleted over 150 GB of files to make room for the people working in the lab.)

So if you're working on a project in the lab, be sure to come back every 2 or 3 days to work on it to avoid risking deletion. And please consider buying an external hard drive to store your project on. This gives you total control over your files, and you never need to fear that we'll delete them when you need them most. More on external drives in a future post, coming soon.

Cheap Flash/Thumb Drives

Just wanted to point out a couple places online that are currently selling a 4GB USB Flash drive for only about $17. Keep in mind we're not endorsing any vendors here, but Amazon.com and Buy.com and NewEgg have this thumb drive available at a price that makes it difficult to turn down.