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External Hard Drive I've never purchased one before and I'm wondering if this sounds like a good deal.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822144069
I plan on storing back-ups of my entire DVD collection on this drive. How many rips would I be able to hold on this drive?
Are you going to be ripping the DVD's to a video file or backing up the DVD's? You can rip a DVD to a good quality XVID or DIVX video file at about 1.5 gigs per file. If you want a complete backup of the DVD they are going to take up more room. Most older DVD's are single layer and will take up around 4 gigs each. The newer ones take up around 8 gigs. You can do the math to figure out how big of a hard drive you need for your collection.
My personal experience is that there quite a few reliable external hard drives well known or not. My Western Digital is fast and has been dropped more then once and works perfect while being quiet. I have larger off brand thats louder and a bit slower but has worked just as well for the past few years. I would just follow the reviews and you should be fine either way. Like mentioned above, if you compress the DVD's you will fit so many more on a hard drive. This coupled with the great software available to burn these files on DVD's or VCD's makes this a win win.
It's been so long since I've ripped/compressed that I'm out of the loop as far as who makes the best software for either. Any suggestions?
A couple years ago I was using DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink. Are these two programs even still around?
It's not that you get less space than advertised. Its that they advertise its size in a different way than it should be reported (as in how windows and most things in the world report size).Originally Posted by DanteHicks
HD manufacturers, for marketing, advertise a "GB" as 1 billion bytes, which is linguistically correct but technically wrong. A GB is really 2^30 bytes, or 1,073,741,824 bytes. So HD boxes literally mean capacity is just about 500,000,000,000 bytes, but windows will tell you its proper size of 465GB.
My "400GB" drive is 400,077,549,568 bytes, windows gives me 372.61GB.
Another thing to notice is sometimes when you install a drive, it doesnt always (or just can't) partition the maximum size to one drive letter, and you have to create a Logical drive to cover the rest. My 372.61GB is divided into a 356.45 and a 16.16. So be sure to fire up the Disk Manager through the control panel and make sure you dont have a big chunk of unused space.
Anyway... luckily, in this case, DVD's are marketed in the same fashion. 4.7GB (DVD5) and 8.5GB(DVD9 - Double Layer) are similarly inflated.
So its easy math. Worst case: 58 movies and change, Best case: 106 movies.
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