Packing for College

Stc95

Stc95

Tribe of Judah Guild Wars Chapter Leader
I leave for college August 21st so I have some time left, albeit less than two months, but still some time. Normally dorm rooms are 2 people per room but, according to the email they sent me, they believe I can handle having 3 guys, including me, in a room. Regardless that the room is larger, in any event I will have significantly less room in my dorm than I do now. Which means I won't be able to carry the gazillion jewel cases of computer games or have access to my collection of DVDs.

I was thinking that I could copy and move the CDs onto a portable HD and just take my HD with me to college, so then I could just run the games off that whenever I decide I want to play them. I believe I've heard some of you guys doing that and would it work with DVDs? I already have RipIt4Me to get the DVD info onto my computer, it is as easy as doing that, moving the file to my portable HD and then being able to watch the movie from that HD? Also, being conscience that I will soon be on a student budget, which is non-existent right now, how big would you guys recommend getting for a portable HD if all of this works? Right now I have 170GB free on a 455GB HD in my laptop, so I'm not taking up oodles of space, but I've never dealt with movies and my cache of games.

Thanks for the help guys :)
~Stc

PS. If everything is to work and legal, what programs would I need to get?
 
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You are going to need a good pair of earplugs and something to cover your eyes. Proven fact: the more guys living in a small room = the less time sleeping/studying (one usually winds up coming at the cost of the other btw).

As for external hard drive, you'll probably want as large of one as you can afford. Though 750 GB should be able to hold all your movies and games, unless you have an absolute ton of either(or both).
 
I have a 500GB Western Digital Passport USB 2.0 external drive and I would recommend it others. My 160GB WD Passport is still kicking, too, as external storage for my Wii. (I dumped my game to the drive and use a USB loader to run games, thus extending the life of the console.)
 
I use the 500GB Western Digital as well. Never a problem - carried everything I needed to the Middle East and back over a year ago and still doing fine. I have four computers' data and photos backed up on it.
 
Since the easy question is answered, at least 500GB, I'm taking everything else is possible to do and fairly easy correct?
 
Stc95 said:
Since the easy question is answered, at least 500GB, I'm taking everything else is possible to do and fairly easy correct?
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Depends on the game discs you want to back up.

Thanks to Steam, I haven't had a game disc to back up in a while (I've use Steam's backup function to store Mass Effect, Source Engine games, and others on my external drive), but you may end up having to use special software like Alcohol 120% to back up game discs with anti-piracy protection.

You might want to pick up a decent 24-CD/DVD wallet on the cheap, skip the expense of game backup software, and keep CDs or DVDs for the games that you can't back up using ImgBurn.
 
Stc95 said:
I already have RipIt4Me to get the DVD info onto my computer
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Errr...never heard of this one...how good of a job does it do...and how long does it take...the best one out there (coming from a once professional video editor) is handbrake, you can get TV quality videos out of DVDs for no more than 700MBs a DVD plus each movie only takes 20-60 mins depending on your computer specs...

EDIT: Doing a little research it looks like RipIt4Me does exactly what DVDfab does...except, RI4M was discontinued over 3 years ago... Not sure how long it takes to pull that whole DVD on there (which is not something I would do anyways), but if you must have the FULL dvd, rather than a much smaller same quality file, DVDfab copies the entire DVD in about 10-20 mins each...however...I HIGHLY recommend reducing those 10GB DVDs into 700MB MP4 or MKV files...
 
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one way to do the "backups" of games and ensure that they keep the "disc-in-drive" functionality working is to copy the game into an ISO image, and use a application such as Virtual Clone Drive to mount the ISO as a virtual drive.
 
500 is not enough. I recommend the samsung story staton 1.5 or 2tb both are cheap at newegg and the drive is amazing. Blows away WD or seagate in my opinion.

look into xbmc or boxie as a sweet ui for playing your content. Virtual clone drive is a great rec too.
 
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Kidan said:
one way to do the "backups" of games and ensure that they keep the "disc-in-drive" functionality working is to copy the game into an ISO image
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Ok, what program would I need to copy the game into an ISO image file? I've been doing that will all my DVDs and have a virtual drive to play them off my HD. Have been really enjoying that, but I wanna start working on my games, I just need to figure out how to get the games to ISO.
 
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