I have a friend in Christchruch NZ and I have some video of me in various local place. So as you can imagine it’s pretty big.
I was gonna just upload it on my website and let her download it. But she doens’t have a fast internet connection and anyway I can get an external drive with 500gb pretty cheap.
It operates with it’s own power (on/off switch) and a usb port or eSata cable.
I was thinking it would be easier just to copy the video over to the External drive and send it to her.
My question is anything I need to be conserned about? I am guessing a USB port is a USB port. What about the power cord? I’m assuming she could by a power adapter at her end.
Her computer is Windows Vista and up to date otherwise, so anything else I’m not thinking of.
I know to pack it well and insure it and I’ll send it certified.
The power cord is actually one of the worst parts to be missing. They come in a ridiculous variety, each brand and model seems to have a different one… if you send the drive, send it with the cord. A plug adapter is easy to find, unlike a new cord.
would the material fit into one or two DVDs? That doesn’t require a power cord and you can send it in a regular “padded” envelope.
A portable hard drive that draws power from the USB ports would seem to be a better solution, but I’d be reluctant to mail a HDD because they can be very fragile. Something with solid state memory, like a USB stick, would be a better option, but obviously won’t hold as much data.
Edited to add: NZ, like Australia, runs 240v power, not 110v, so it’s more than just a different plug involved.
Couldn’t you burn to DVDs? No moving parts, no power required, cheaper to mail, each disk will hold 4.7GB. You could buy a lot of the for them price of an external hard drive.
The other thing is postage; just got an A4 sized padded envelope from the US and it was US$12, a small box is marked US$27.
How much video is it in time and file size? If you crunch it down with one of the various free tools, 90 mins will fit on a 4.7GB DVD. Even more.
Or, as posted above, after crunching, copy it to one or more USB sticks; they can be got in 8GB or more now for not much.
If you do send an external drive and it’s not like Cazzle’s suggustion, check the power supply is one of those multi voltage types. It’ll be labeled AC 100-240V 50-60Hz or something similar. Your friend can get an adapter here to make the US style plug fit our 3 pronged, 230V 50Hz outlets. But pad the drive really well and note that Customs may well check its contents out.
Or, if it’s ok and the file isn’t a huge size, I’ll download it and post it to her. For this area, I’ve go an ok-ish connection with data at NZ$1/GB
I can’t see why insurance or certified mail would be especially useful here. A good-sized external hard drive can these days be had for around $60. In the unusual case that it goes missing, you simply send another.
It’s reliably true that insurance costs significantly more than the “expected loss”. IOW:
CostOfInsurance > ValueOfItem * ChanceOfLoss
In fact, it’s often the case that
CostOfInsurance ~= 3 * ValueOfItem * ChanceOfLoss
It’s generally true that when your chance of loss is no greater than average and the cost of a loss is easily bearable, insurance is a bad (i.e. money-losing) idea.
I second the DVD’s. I recently shipped a 3 pound box to New Zealand for about $10. The USPS has a first class parcel rate that allows one to send an item internationally, up to 4 pounds, at a fairly reasonable rate.
If you send any electronic item that is powered off the mains, then you need to take into account the fact that in NZ both the voltage and the arrangement of the pins on the plug are different (as Cazzle said). However, often these items will run happily off either 110 V or 240 V mains power – the transformer that comes with the hard drive will say on its label what power supply it needs. If it works off both voltages, then all you need is a plug adapter, which will probably cost about NZD 15-20. If it requires a voltage transformer, then you can almost certainly buy one in NZ. I bought one earlier this year in Australia to run a device that needed 110 V, and it cost me about AUD 60 (including GST), so I’d guess about NZD 80 for one.
We’re talking almost 500gb of data. Remember videos take up a huge amount of data.
I would send the power cord to and let her get an adapter.
I always send major stuff to NZ certified, because I’ve been doing this since I was a kid (we’ve know each other since I was a little kid) and most things go very fast but every so often it’ll take six to eight months to get a simple letter through. I’ve had Christmas cards to her arrive in July. And those were sent First Class. Usually it’s within five days or less though.
I guess I could do CDs but after she’s done looking at me all around Chicago, she then can burn them to DVDs herself and keep the drive for her own use. So it’d be a kind of present too
I’ve bought lots of external drives in the mail and never had an issue. They were all very well packaged.
You never actually specify how much data you’re sending, but it’s reasonable to assume that video doesn’t take up a huge amount of storage capacity. 500 GB of video in any reasonable format (at DVD rates with 5.1 sound) is going to be around 200-300 hours! Use MPEG-4 and you could double that to almost 600 hours (almost a month of solid viewing).
So, either this stuff is uncompressed - in which case run it through Quicktime or similar and ship out a couple of DVDs, or you are sending a couple of weeks worth of full time viewing.