The Western Digital Raptor is one of the fastest hard drives available. With a 10,000 RPM spindle speed, this hard drive will really load images FAST! Plus this hard drive has a manufacture warranty which will not expire until January 2013!
Since Monty went Digital in 2001, hard drives which once seemed so HUGE are no longer quite so 'big'. Hard drive technology has really increased the capacity of drives over the past few years. It's hard to imagine that just 12 years ago a 4 GB drive seemed big. In 2007 Monty shot over 1TB (1000 GB) of photos and shot nearly that by June 2008! Oh, how time's change.
Today, hard drive capacity is over a terabyte, which is huge, but with a 21 MP Canon 1DS Mark III camera, and shooting RAW images, Monty averages over 5 GB of photos a Day! He also saves everything on three separate drives. That comes to well over 15 GB of drive space needed every day. That's over 5 TB a year! Needless to say, those smaller drives kind of seem really tiny now.
Monty is moving everything from his smaller drives onto larger hard drives. What this means is that there is a growing stack of perfectly good hard drives which are still HUGE by most peoples' standers. Most have hardly been used at all.
Now for the best part. Monty has decided to offer these used drives, not blank, but with ALL of the Photo of the Day archive images. There are currently over 20,000 different photos being offered on these drives!!! Of course those with Archive access can download these, but downloading 20,000+ photos is very time consuming. It's much nicer to just have them all in one spot.
Each photo is saved in a dated directory down to the specific month it was taken. Each photo exists in three versions: the thumbnail as seen on the main page of Photo of the Day, and two big 1024x667 pixel images - one with the drop shadow and one without. The drive will contain ALL* photo of the day images up to the date the drive is shipped! You now need not be a Photo of the Day subscriber to get every image in the archives! Even more, when the archives were created in 2005, Monty simply searched for *.psd files. This means that many more than Photo of the Day images ended up in the archives! These were not posted to the site as they were not part of the program, however it was easier to just leave them in the file directory than try to figure out which ones did not belong. This means that there will be a lot of images from 2002-2005 that are NOT posted on the website! Despite all this, all these files only take up a small percentage of the entire drive so when you purchase one of these, you will have lots and lots and lots of room for your own stuff - great for backing your own files!!!
The drives are formatted NTFS and will require some technical knowledge to install them in your computer. The drives require a computer which can handle larger hard drives such as systems running Windows XP service pack 2 or Vista. These drives are the faster, newer, SATA drives, not the older EIDE. Your computer will need to have a motherboard with SATA capabilities or you will need a SATA PCI card. An optional external USB 2 enclosure can be made available for a small fee for those who do not have the technical skill or desire to install the drive internally.
Quantities are very limited to stock on hand.
*Some images that were taken by Jessica and others when Monty was traveling have not been found, but ALL of Monty's images will be on the CD.
