Now you’ve gone and done it. You expanded your digital lifestyle this holiday season. You purchased a digital still camera, or a digital video camera, or a personal digital music player, or some combination thereof.

When it came time to open presents, you insisted that the digital camera or camcorder was opened first, so you could record the gleeful expressions and joyful laughter as the rest of the bounty was unveiled. With eager anticipation, you attached the camera to your computer to begin storing your new-found digital legacy. The world is your digital oyster.

Now reality sets in. All that digital media data takes up a lot of space on your computer’s hard drive. What’s a budding Ansel Adams or Steven Spielberg to do?

You need more space. Remember that one minute of digital video footage takes up about 250MB of drive space, so the gigabytes on a drive can fill up quickly. One way to get more space is to add another hard drive to your computer system. This can be done a couple of different ways. Many “tower” computer enclosures have space for another drive, mounted internally. These drives can be purchased at local resellers or online catalogs, and 160GB capacity can be had for around $125. Look for drives that run at 7200 RPM and have an 8MB “buffer”. This buffer is memory that is used to stage and cue data coming into and out of the drive, which decreases seek times and provides a smooth editing environment.

Once you’ve chosen a drive and you’re ready to install, you’re looking for two connections – the power supply connector, and the data connector. Connect both plugs to the drive, seat the drive in the drive bay, restart your computer, and depending upon the level of “plug and play” supported by your computer and its operating system, your new drive should be ready to use. As you are just storing data on this drive for archiving and editing, you shouldn’t need to install any operating system software on the drive. Again, the ease of this method of installation is dependent on your system’s ability to accept the new drive – on a Windows-based machine, you may have to deal with drivers – on a Mac, it will most likely “just work”.

Another way to add a hard drive to your system is to go with a FireWire or USB 2.0 based external drive. Smaller FireWire drives may not even need their own power supply, as the FireWire connector includes pins that supply power to the drive when connected. Larger FireWire drives and USB 2.0 drives may require their own power source. Both FireWire and USB 2.0 provide data transfer speeds sufficient to not only record video, but to edit it as well. Steer clear of USB 1.0-based hard drives. Their data transfer rates are so slow that while you could copy data back-and-forth (albeit really, really, slowly), they will not support the speeds needed to do even the most rudimentary editing.

What about digital still photos? Most consumer cameras come with a fairly small memory card. Consider purchasing a larger-capacity memory card, as a three or four megapixel camera can produce some hefty sized files at maximum resolution. To make like easier, get a memory card reader. This handy accessory attaches to your computer’s USB port. Rather than attaching the camera to the computer every time you want to transfer your photos, you simply remove the memory card, insert it into the card reader slot, and move the photos onto the computer from there.

© 2003 Peter F. Zimowski