Today's Hard Drives, Printers Not Sufficient for Photography

External hard drives are a tricky lot to review. Whether it's a sizable 5.5 inch box able to hold 320GB from LaCie or a tiny 2.5-inch such as the Samsung 500GB that ships today, the external hard drive concept is a dicey proposition.

The warranty concept for these little beasts is scary. Think about it. If the machine breaks down within in three years of purchase, you get a new one.

If you've got nearly 500GB of data on an external hard drive and it breaks down, I'd say you're in big trouble, especially if you don't have that hard drive backed up.

What it comes down to is to be ultra safe, you need another hard drive for back up (that is unless you've got the data on your laptop).

If you're a photographer, you want your photographs to last a lifetime, which means that you'll probably want a hard drive to last a lifetime.

No matter how good a hard drive is, though, none of them are built to last a lifetime. Specs change, technology changes so that in the next lifetime nothing will be the same as it is in this lifetime.

So what's a photographer to do to save his/her photos?

Print them out is one way, but with thousands of high resolution photographs that are now possible to be stored on one hard drive, printing them all is a daunting task.

In the future, printing technology will be faster and more efficient. It should be. Photographers need to print out their best work quickly, and the technology today for both printers and hard drives is not sufficient to save a photographer's best work over the long haul.