Digital Photography Storage Guide: Hard Disks, DVD & CD

For security and peace of mind, it is always advisable to archive or backup your image files to an external hard disk, DVD or other optical media as computer hard disks often fail or can become corrupted through viruses. With many digital cameras having 8 megapixels or more, image file sizes have grown rapidly and now require large storage solutions.

DVDs are a cheap and easy way to back up large amounts of image files and current DVDs can hold approximately 4.7 gb of data in both DVD-R and DVR+R formats.

CDs can only hold around 650mb or 700mb or data and have largely been replaced by DVDs which offer much higher capacities at almost the same cost. All DVD drives can read DVDs as well as CDs.

The cost of internal and external DVD writers has fallen dramatically over the years and nearly all DVD writers are capable of writing or burning to DVD-R and DVD+R discs as well as rewritable DVD-RW and DVD+RW discs. The DVD is slowly being replaced by Blu Ray and HD-DVD discs but as these are competing formats, the situation is still unclear about which format will dominate the market if any. Blu Ray can store upto 25gb and 50gb on a double sided disc while HD-DVD discs can store 15gb and 30gb on a double sided disc.

External hard disks are an excellent choice for storing image files. Most external hard disks can be connected to a computer using USB2 or firewire connections offering high speed data transfer. External hard disks for home or office use can now be found at very low prices ranging in capacity from 40gb to 500gb or more.

External Hard Disk

Small pocket size external hard disks use 2.5" disks which are normally used in laptops while the physically larger external drives use 3.5" SATA or EIDE hard drives that are more commonly used in your average desktop computer. Network storage devices are also proving to be more popular with the explosion in home broadband wireless networks.

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Digital Photography Storage: Hard Disks, DVD, CD, Blu Ray & HD-DVD

Digital Photography Storage Guide: Hard Disks, DVD & CD