Introduction to SCSI Ultra2 LVD hard drives from leading manufacturers

Hard drives are what keep digital images readily available, as opposed to removable drives which have to be loaded and unloaded (presuming you can find the right disk in the several piles littering your studio).

The ideal way to handle large projects is to have a separate hard drive to hold all the pertinent images. This is especially helpful if you are working with thousand of images or images from a large format digital camera .

If you need image database management software, that is an additional solution, but it is considerably easier to have each major on-going project all together on a large hard drive (they come in 36 GB sizes and above these days). An even better solution is a RAID system (Level 0 is the fastest).

A single FLAAR photography project in Guatemala generated about 200 GB of data. That is a lot of removable disks, so we simply bought a stack of Seagate Cheetah Ultra2 LVD hard drives to handle this mass of material.

Manufacturer	Comments
Hitachi	Seldom seen offered in mainstream mail order catalogs
IBM	We have had problems with some IBM drives (not turning on, could not format them). Better Light found Quantum drives faster in any event.
Quantum	Quantum has a good reputation, preferred by Better Light for their digital cameras because they can sustain constant rate of transfer needed for a large format digital camera which is pumping out data over the half hour that it may take to do a full 360 degree panorama photograph or large circumferential rollout. Michael Collette rates Quantum as noticeably faster than IBM of same rating.
Seagate	A world leader in hard drives, Barracuda, Cheetah
Western Digital

Most mail order companies put their own brand name on the outside of the box. I prefer external drives since we have several computers in more than one office. It helps to be able to move the drives around. I like drives from ProDirect since they have a large housing (extra space for cooling) and their electrical systems are for international current (both USA and Europe).