[daacon]

Gotta love the new(er) Laptops. My 8 month old Dell XPS M1730 with its 320 GB was suffering from RSP** and the K10D / K20D (** Random Sh&# Photography and HUGE raw files), and I don't really store the raw files on the Laptop for very long - gives you an idea of how many jpg's I have. Also lots of music and some video files man space just goes .....

Well I took the back panel off and noticed a disk caddy and ummm there is enough room for another HD .

Off to the local tech store a mere $124 for a 500GB Seagate (5400 rpm , I would not notice the difference in 7200 rpm you really need to go to 10k or 15k before it makes an appreaciable difference IMHO) 15 or so minutes and she should be set now for another year

Unreal I now have a Laptop with almost a terabyte of disk space and I know it will not last - can't wait for the next generation (we will have terabyte thumb drives soon enough).

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Last edited by daacon; 05-01-2009 at 08:58 PM.

[Venturi]

you didn't opt for solid state drives?!

I just finished phase 1 of upgrades myself on our 2 workstations tonight. Went from dual-core AMD 2Ghz w/ 4G RAM to Intel Core 2 Quads and 4G PC3 12800 RAM. So far, smooth sailing.

[daacon]

Nice Jim - solid state nahhh too bleeding edge (re: $$$$) for that much disk space ... maybe next Laptop. I am not even sure are they SATA interface ?

I am thinking about my desktop as well - need to either get a new one or go your route ...at some point it does not become cost effective ... not sure which one but by fall I will have made a choice.

[heliphoto]

Hey the drive drive in my two year old MacBook just crashed last month and I put that same drive in as a replacement - so far so good and since the old drive was 160GB, it feels downright roomy!

[Venturi]

yeah. I was just teasing on the SSD's. I'd love to have 'em but they need a couple years for the prices to simmer down and the capacity to boil up still for me.

[daacon]

Yep I agree but it won't be long. The only constant is change , price drop, bledding edge price increase and change . Like a lot of us I paid $5k for my first laptop - paid less than half that for this one.

This is the first laptop I have owned that will hold two hard drives so that was a bonus and Dell use to be so proprietary with Bios restrictions , hardware, etc but man it was painless I was plesantly surprised. .

[heatherslightbox]

I'm in a similar situation with my desktop, except it's my motherboard and processor that need to be upgraded. I'm currently running a Pentium 4 maxed out at 2GB of RAM and it can be rather slow, especially if I'm using Lightroom. This PC also has Vista, which I hate, so I'm also looking for a downgrade to XP.

I'm trying to get this upgrade accomplished in the most economical, but smart way possible; I went to a local shop and got a quote to get all of the above done and the price came out to $450--almost enough to buy a whole new computer! They are currently running a special on a PC that has most of what I want on it for $549; I'd just need to add RAM and a media card reader and I'd be set. To throw another kink into it, another photographer that I know owns a computer shop in Ohio and has offered to build me a new PC at his cost and ship it to me here in Florida. I've emailed him back and have told him that I'm definitely interested in taking him up on his offer and I'm just waiting for him to get back to me with a definite price. Even though he's in Ohio, I really like the idea of having another photograher design and build my PC since he has a better understanding of what a photographer really needs in a PC, anyhow.

For this system, I want it configured so that it'll last me for the next several years, so I'm being picky as to what I want. I want this new PC to last me more than a couple of years (I've had the one that I'm currently using for a little over 2 years); I figure that I'd rather be spending the money on gear--another couple of years and I'll most likely be looking to upgrade the K20.

Heather

[xs400]

I hate threads like this. My 8 year old Pentium III 500 MHz laptop with 512 Mbytes RAM and 40G hard drive just won't die and I keep on using it. Maybe it's time I finally upgrade to something faster. BTW, I don't use my laptop for post processing of photos - K20 raw files are way too big for old laptop.

[Gooshin]

conventional harddrives are the achilies heel of laptops

for best operation they should be in a horizontal position and never disturbed with plenty of cooling. (sound like something a laptop does alot... right?)

i suggest discarding the notion of using your laptop is a portable storage device, at any rate the notion of using it reliably, and upgrade to SSD instead. (although quality SSD is still quite expensive)

[ftpaddict]

No worries; your laptop's battery will feel the difference in rpm.

[daacon]

Well the Laptop is not my main storage device but I do use it extensively and as Frank pointed out the K20D raw files plus all my other stuff just chews up space. And as long as I have the space I store most of my pics. It a great to be able to show them on a Laptop.

I have several USB external drives I use for backups of machine images, photos, music, etc. The Dell XPS is a huge power sucking beast to begin with so it is rarely on battery power - even at its peak you would be lucky to get a hour out of the battery (I have a workhorse 14" with a 9 Cell battery for portable power).

I have been running all week with both drives seems to work well. Having the extra HD space is nice and convenient. I always use a Laptop cooler on this machine as well as mentioned it is a power pig and normally runs hot.

I feel for ya Frank - I am on the computer all day every day (it's what I do) so I have multiple machines and normally switch them out every 2 - 4 years. I still remember my XT that would boot from a floppy for remote access to work. If I remember correctly it was about 12 minutes from power on to connection

Gooshin - I will probably replace the laptop before the price of large size storage SSD becomes a low cost mainstream ...

Heather best of luck on the new Desktop - generally much easier to upgrade but as you have now noticed with today's prices the upgrade should be cheap otherwise a replacement makes much more sense.

For me adding the HD was well worth it. YMMV

[Jimbo]

Just picked up an external terabyte HD for my pictures. The ones I really want to keep get backed up on CD's. What I need to do more often, is to purge the old photo's I don't want. Now have a 160 gig external and the terabyte. Cheers Dave and good luck bud! I use my company lap top to load and PP which they upgrade every two years. JIM

I'm going out to buy a 2TB external HDD on the weekend. My PC has 500GB, not enough for everything else I have on here.

[heatherslightbox]

Heather best of luck on the new Desktop - generally much easier to upgrade but as you have now noticed with today's prices the upgrade should be cheap otherwise a replacement makes much more sense.

After seeing a deal like this:
Gateway - Desktop with AMD Phenom™ Triple-Core Processor 8400 - DX4200-UB101A
...it would make a lot more sense to get a whole new PC. I figure that in that case, I could get the husband to clean up the hard drive on the old one and put it up for sale locally. It's still perfectly good for basic stuff like email, web surfing, and word processing. I might be able to get $200 out of it.

In the meantime, I'm still waiting on the photographer buddy to get back with me on a price for him to build me a new system.

Heather

After seeing a deal like this:
Gateway - Desktop with AMD Phenom™ Triple-Core Processor 8400 - DX4200-UB101A
...it would make a lot more sense to get a whole new PC. I figure that in that case, I could get the husband to clean up the hard drive on the old one and put it up for sale locally. It's still perfectly good for basic stuff like email, web surfing, and word processing. I might be able to get $200 out of it.

In the meantime, I'm still waiting on the photographer buddy to get back with me on a price for him to build me a new system.

Heather

Stay away from gateway. You're better off with a Dell