What Are You Doing RIGHT NOW? Part ELEVEN: Through the Wormhole...

[bclewis]

Is replacing the hard drive in a laptop a relatively simple thing to do?
...
Video takes up a lot of disc space, especially when it's of un-assy quality. So I want to get a computer with a very very large hard drive

Any reason not just to get an external hard drive? You can get several terabytes for ~ $100 these days I believe.

[ oops, didn't notice MMB posted the same thing ]

[SheSaidSheSaid]

Can't you just get an external hard drive? The one I have is 1 TB and it was like $70 when I got it 2 or so years ago.

I've never been able to load something directly on to an external hard drive, and access it from there for use in a program on the computer itself. That's what would need to happen. I would need to have the video be loaded from the camera directly onto the (external) HDD without it going first onto the computer's HDD (which as I say, I've never been able to do with the 500GB external HDD I have). Once there, my video editing software needs to be able to find it as though it were on the computer itself. And then presumably my disc burning software on this computer (if I cheap out on the new one it may not have a burner).

Am I just a n00b? Is all of that more possible than I think?

[bclewis]

I've never been able to load something directly on to an external hard drive, and access it from there for use in a program on the computer itself.

Once you plug in the hard drive, as long as everything is working correctly, it effectively IS "on the computer itself".

[Munnchy]

Yeah, that's kinda the problem. It doesn't really do me any good to just have one. Or even two. I need at least three to shoot a movie. Which means I need a computer with a staggeringly large hard drive.

Portable hard drives are a godsend if that's the only reason you want to upgrade the hard drive. I spent £50 a couple of years back and had an extra 500GB of space to mess around with. Still haven't used all of it.

Edit: I just noticed the other post. You should be able to use an external/portable one just fine...

[MagicMurderBag7]

Hmm, I've never had that problem with my hard drive. I've been able to move things from a flash drive to the external hard drive without it touching the computer's hard drive before. Not sure why you wouldn't be able to...

As for the program not being able to find it, not sure what that's about either. I don't know what program you're using but I use my external for all my music and the Zune software finds it with no problem after I told it where to look. I'm sure whatever program you're using has an option to change where to look for videos.

[SheSaidSheSaid]

Then what am I doing wrong? When I tried doing something similar in the past (internet download in that case -- and strictly legal!) it told me there wasn't sufficient space on the hard drive for that file. Which indeed there wasn't on my laptop's main HDD -- it's only got about 30 or 40 free gigs, and the video in question was well over 100. I had it specify, I think it was the E: drive for the External HDD, and it never did work.

[Munnchy]

100 GB file? What?! What format is that in?! I'm fairly sure there's a 4GB size limit on single file transfers. Grouped files more than 4GB in total are fine, but one file over 4GB cannot be transferred to external hard drives... i think..

[bclewis]

Then what am I doing wrong? When I tried doing something similar in the past (internet download in that case -- and strictly legal!) it told me there wasn't sufficient space on the hard drive for that file.

Some downloader programs will temporarily store data in Temp space on (say) your C: drive; that's one possibility I guess.

[SheSaidSheSaid]

100 GB file? What?! What format is that in?! I'm fairly sure there's a 4GB size limit on single file transfers. Grouped files more than 4GB in total are fine, but one file over 4GB cannot be transferred to external hard drives... i think..

So same problem, then, because when I shoot my movie each camera's gonna hold way more than that in video.

[bclewis]

100 GB file? What?! What format is that in?! I'm fairly sure there's a 4GB size limit on single file transfers. Grouped files more than 4GB in total are fine, but one file over 4GB cannot be transferred to external hard drives... i think..

You'd better tell my hard drive that then

Edit: oh, probably because your harddrive is formatted as FAT32. NTFS doesn't have that problem.