One of the strangest things I have found these days is how expensive external hard drives are in Korea. I have always championed the fact that Korean Online shopping will find what you need and cheaper than relying on other websites like Amazon. However, when looking for a new hard drive to backup my photos I was shocked to find that Korea offers a) few options over 500gb and b) very expensive prices. I was left scratching my head.

When I searched what were the popular brands for larger drives I found that Western Digital and Seagate topped the list. Amazon had 2 tb models on for as low as $89. A similar search on Gmarket proved that the few selections of the 1 tb or greater were actually Western Digital products too. For the similar price mark of “under 100,000 won” for 2 tb, Gmarket and Danawa offered very little that compared to the prices that I found on Amazon. That isn’t to say that there weren’t options or products for around the same price. In fact, Danawa found a Samsung 2 tb for about 150,000 won and a BK data station for 88,000 won but I felt that Western digital was the better drive.

When ever I look for products like this, I tend to hit Danawa pretty hard. What I like about searching through them is that they give you the best prices from a number of sources and organize them smartly. So when I was searching for “way-jong hard-uh” which is the Korean term for these things, I found each hard drive list according to the product and then multiple sizes and prices listed next to it. Why I like this is that when you shop on places like Gmarket, you will see hundreds of the same pictures and products but different sizes for each posting. This greatly simplifies the search.

At any rate, I was at Costco this past weekend and found that they had the WD My Book Essential 2 TB for around 139,000 won. With all things considered and the fact that I have spent the last few weeks moving files around to make enough space to dump an 8 GB card, I bought it. So far I am pretty happy with it.

Out of the Box

The unit itself is like what the title says, about the size of a standard hardcover book. Like most hard drives, it comes with a power cable and adapter for Korea along with the USB 3.o cable. The actual paper instructions were simplistic with only 3 pictures; attach adapter and plug-in, plug cable into hard drive, connect to computer. However, for a mac there are a few steps more as I found out when I tried to move some stuff over to it before reformatting it.

Reformatting

As soon as I plugged in the hard drive my mac picked up that it was there and I could see what was on it. However, the more detailed instructions contained in the files on the drive indicated that in order to use the drive on a mac, it must first be partitioned and reformatted. The process was relitivly simple but I did have to restart my computer after the first attempt because I received a dialogue stating that it couldn’t “unmount the drive” However, after that, the process was straight forward and outlined in detail on their website

Speed

The things I put on the new drive were my back up files dating back to 2007. The first chunk of 150 GB took about 2 hours using standard USB connections. The second chunk of about 130 GB took about an hour because that drive is connected via firewire. Overall, I can’t say that it was blindingly fast or anything. Moving that much data is always going to take some time.

File Organization and Storage

I normally keep the original RAW files indexed by date in a separate folder. So when you enter that folder you will have all of the dates chronologically listed. I prefer this system at least for the original RAW files because you may label something wrong or give a set a funny name at the time and then forget what you named it later (trust me I have done this). The dates don’t lie and you can get the proper dates from the exif data if you can’t remember when you shot certain photos. I always keep the originals separate from my final photos because if a client wants a hi-res shot of a photo they’ve seen on Flickr or something, I can work from the original file. I also like having these indexed because I can go back to earlier works and rework them with the new software or techniques that I have picked up or learned how to use.

The rest of the file structure that I use gets broken down into a few files. The unprocessed tone mapped photomatix files get put into and “HDR” folder and then divided by location. Then other shots for other purposes get labelled as such. The largest of which is “WEB” which contains the low-res photos used for posting to websites and my blog.

This may not be the best way to organize files but it has worked for me for the past many years.

The Final Word

Overall I am happy with this drive and would say that it is a worthwhile purchase. I am still shocked at how much data I use because I still remember when I bought my first computer and the guy told me that “With 10 gigs of memory, you’ll be hard pressed to fill it up” I now have a memory card for my camera that is almost as big. The main thing that I would say when choosing a hard drive is to research about the quality and known issues. The last thing that you want to do is to pour the last few years of your photographic life on to a drive and then after deleting the files from your computer or older drive, get an error message stating that the files are corrupted or you can’t access them. The other thing I would caution is that if you do buy in Korea, make sure that the drive is compatible with Macs (if you have one). I know that it may just be as simple as reformatting the drive but it may not. So just double check and be safe.