I'm looking into buying a USB hard drive....

[chloewindle1]

Hi,

I'm looking into buying a USB hardrive. (Toshiba 500GB StorE Basics USB 3.0 Portable External Hard Drive ) I need somewhere to store my images as it's making my laptop slow with them being stored on there.

Just a few questions, could I have PS on my usb hard drive or does that have to be stored ON my laptop?! As I know of someone who can update my photoshop's and other editing softwares but I don't want to give them my laptop so was wondering if i could give them my hard drive for them to put Lightroom 5 and PS CC on.

Thanks

 

[chloewindle1]

AND ALSO, WOULD 500GB BE ENOUGH???

 

[ORourkeK]

The question of "AND ALSO, WOULD 500GB BE ENOUGH???" is really a decision for you to make. How much memory are your pictures taking up on your laptop? 500 GB is a lot of space, but being that externals are so cheap these days, it may be worth a bump up to 1 TB. As far as running PS and LR off of it... sure it is possible. You just have to install it onto the drive. Just know, it will run a lot slower than it would if it were installed on your main drive.

 

[JerryLove]

I'm looking into buying a USB hardrive. (Toshiba 500GB StorE Basics USB 3.0 Portable External Hard Drive ) I need somewhere to store my images as it's making my laptop slow with them being stored on there.

Though there are edge exceptions, notably where your laptop drive is "almost full" (which can result in thrashing if the swap file is dynamic and not finding contiguous space) ; storing images on your laptop does not make it slower.

Just a few questions, could I have PS on my usb hard drive or does that have to be stored ON my laptop?! As I know of someone who can update my photoshop's and other editing softwares but I don't want to give them my laptop so was wondering if i could give them my hard drive for them to put Lightroom 5 and PS CC on.

You can install PS onto an external HDD, but it would still require access to your OS drive (your laptop) during the installation for the various DLL installations, registrations, and registry entries performed during the install.

I have no idea what constitutes "updates" in this case, nor what the requirements would be. I don't recommend putting PS on an external drive.

AND ALSO, WOULD 500GB BE ENOUGH???

Only you can answer that. How big are your photos now? How many do you plan to store?

I'd personally go 2TB, because storage is cheap.

That said: don't forget to backup.

 

[DSRay]

You might want to consider a DVD drive instead; unlimited storage. :mrgreen:

 

[astroNikon]

the nice things about those smaller USB devices is that they run from a powered USB. Thus no power cord needed.

The bad part is it's not much storage.

I have one of these USB powered devices on my macs, it's about 1 TB

But for all my Lightroom processing I have a 3TB drive, which requires a separate power chord, for processing and exporting files. RAW to JPEG etc.


just giving options ... it also depends upon your camera too I use a d7000 (16 mp) and a d600 (24 mp) which can create some pretty big RAW files.

 

[vimwiz]

The downsides of the USB powered ones is they generally use 5400rpm drives whereas the larger powered ones may spin at up to 7200 rpm, Try and get one with USB3 or eSATA if your box supports it. Basically, otherwise, writing large RAWs out will be slow as it will block on IOwait.