External Hard Drive for Imaging?

[Matty P (Matt)]

My laptop's Hard drive is rapidly filling up with planetary image data and I am hoping that an external HD will fix this problem.

After an imaging session, there is usually between 15gb and 20gb+ of data. I do go through and delete bad quality data but it still adds up. I am considering getting an external HDD to free up the laptop's hard drive.

I am concerned that if I use a external HDD for imaging, I won't be able to capture at fast frames rates with the camera. Will this be a problem?

or

Should I capture onto my laptop's HD first. Then transfer the data over to the external HD?

[iceman (Mike)]

I capture directly onto an external USB2 HDD with no problems at all, at 60fps 640x480.

It's much easier to then just take the data to any computer and plug it into the USB.

Make sure you zip up old avi's as they compress very well.

[leon]

Although Mike dose it differently to me, Im sure both methods would be successful.

I Image to the Laptop, do the processing and stuff on the Laptop, then transfer any wanted data to the external H/D for safe keeping.

This works for me, but I'm sure either method would suit you well.

Leon

[g__day (Matthew)]

Well I go through 10/100 or 10/100/1000 switches to either normal HDD, raid arrays or a NAS. Performance never seems to be a problem and its easy to build a terabyte of Network Attached Storage!