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Gear Photography Tools Toolbox: Networks & Storage For Photographers
Gear Photography Tools Toolbox: Networks & Storage For Photographers
Toolbox: Networks & Storage For PhotographersGet connected and protect your image archive with the latest in networking and backup devices |
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Page 2 of 4 To connect your home computers to each other and to external storage via Ethernet, you’ll need a network hub and cables long enough to connect your devices. Wireless. One of the obvious disadvantages of Ethernet is that you need wires wherever you have a connection. While some technologies allow you to network over power lines, a more popular solution is WiFi wireless networking. It’s built in to most laptops today and is an easy and affordable option to add to a desktop or laptop with either an external or internal antenna. Like Ethernet, you’ll also need a wireless router to serve as the center of the network. The disadvantages? Wireless isn’t as fast as Ethernet. You need to make sure that your wireless network is secure so someone can’t steal your bandwidth or your data. You also need to make sure all of your wireless devices use the same wireless standard. Storage I’m showing my age when I say that the first hard drive I had was 20 megabytes. With a single image file now approaching that size, storage is critical. There are myriad options for file storage. Internal. While your computer came with a built-in hard drive, you might have the option to add another internal hard drive. You’ll need to investigate if there’s physical room in the computer for mounting a drive and whether there are available data and power connections. Depending on your particular hardware, the types of connection might be IDE, Serial ATA or SCSI. You’ll need to consult your computer manual to see which interface it uses for disk drives. Serial ATA (SATA) is the newest technology. It’s starting to be used in both Windows and Mac machines. Before that, Windows typically used IDE and Mac used SCSI. Besides deciding on the amount of data the new drive will store (measured in gigabytes), you’ll also have to decide the speed of the drive (measured in revolutions per minute—5400, 7200 or 10,000, for example). The higher the number, the quicker the drive can access your data. But this comes at a premium—the fastest drives will be much more expensive per gigabyte.   |
