When it comes to photography, shooting digital is wonderful, since really the only limiting factor to how many pictures you can take is how much memory you have to store them. The price of storage has massively dropped, meaning idiots like me who overshoot and hate deleting any pictures ever can cram massive hard drives full of substandard content.
Prime Day is a great occasion to pick up some cheap storage. In addition to my previous post about Prime Day deals, which included some SD cards, this one will focus on hard drives to pick up for yourself or your favorite photographer.
“But Andy, what if you’re our favorite photographer?” By all means feel free, I’ll shoot you a mailing address lol.
[Note: what follows are affiliate links. Should you make a subsequent purchase I may be paid a commission.]
USD External Hard Drives
I use three 12TB external hard drives to back up all my work, which sounds like a lot but then again I own a 64-megapixel camera as well as a 100-megapixel camera, so any picture I take is pretty fierce in how much space it requires. Two are plugged in to my iMac at any given time and mirrored to each other daily. Once a month I unplug one of them and rotate in another one, then rotate the other out and store it, unplugged, off-site.
This is overkill for a lot of people, but USB hard drives fail. If you’re a photographer and have something backed up once, you don’t have it backed up. If it’s backed up twice, it’s backed up once. If it’s backed up three times, partially stored offsite, and backed up in two separate places in the cloud, like me, you won’t have any money left over you’re probably overdoing it but your images will be safe I guess.
There are two types of external hard drives: those with moving parts and solid-state drives. Here are some deals I’m seeing.
For the home or office (basically where you’re not needing to move it around very often)
This 8TB hard drive is fantastic and (when at checkout) is as cheap as $126 for Prime Day. To put this in perspective, I’m seeing 4TB hard drives on sale for around $100, so for only $26 more you can double your storage. The reason I say this is for a home or office is it has its own separate power supply, so I don’t think it would be good to take on the road with you.
A cheap, durable option for traveling – 38% off
LaCie LAC9000298 Rugged Mini 2TB External Hard Drive Portable HDD
This LaCie rugged portable 2TB hard drive can store plenty of pictures and doesn’t need an external power source, it’s powered by the USB drive from your computer. Its unique look is due to it being designed for frequent use on the road. One of the biggest risks for an HDD with moving parts is dropping it. I’ve personally nuked a 4TB hard drive by placing it precariously on a park bench while editing a photo and it yeeted itself off to an early death. I lost quite a few photos because of it. LaCie hard drives are drop resistant and water resistant (not waterproof or drop-proof, mind you).
A more expensive, but probably worth it, option for traveling – good but not great Prime Day deal
These little guys are amazing. They’re solid state drives, meaning they have no moving parts, which makes them far more secure than a portable hard drive with numerous moving parts. They’re also much smaller than an equivalent HDD, freeing up more space for cameras and lenses on your trip. They’re more expensive as a result (this one is 16% off for a price of $235). It’s a good, but not great, deal for Prime Day.
I personally own I think 4 of these little hard drives to use when I do commercial work on location, and one of them is also in my Tesla for their dashcam.
