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Any suggestions on Expanding my hard drive.
I was just wondering if anyone could make a suggestion or two about a good hard drive to get. I am running a Mac G5 dual 2.7 with 3GB SDRAM. I currently have the standard 250 GB hard drive but I Need more space, like 500GB or 750GB. I need this for Final Cut Pro. probably be used mainly as the scratch disk. If you can recommend any good hard drives that are fast and reliable it would be greatly appreciated. Also let me know what your preference is between internal and external. I dont know much about computer jargon so any help is appreciated.
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5 Replies
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Hate to answer your question with a question, but what format of video?
That matters a lot in terms of what answer to give you.
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Personally no matter what type of video you are doing I would go with a second internal drive for media, and an external fw for scratch space.
Depending on how much you want to spend, I would look into an SATA bus and then do an internal SATA raid… but this will really depend on the type of video you are doing… the scratch no matter what I would go with Lacie, I like their bus architecture better… and they are the most reliable company I have used…
Simon Carlson-Thies
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pt would be for minidv and possibly HDV sometime down the road
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Here’s what I have:
Two Firmtek external SATA enclosures and a 4-channel Firmtek hot-swappable PCI SATA host adapter.
Each client has their own SATA RAID pair set aside on a shelf. There are also additional SATA archive/backup drives for a total of 14 250-gigabyte drives (a total of more than 3.2 terabyte when formatted). This setup has proven to be flexible and easily expandable.
Haven’t had any problems yet, and I’ve been using them for a couple of years now. First in a standard external box, then later converting them to a hot-swappable system.
Be aware that some drives work better than others with the Firmtek cards. The Hitachi/IBM’s are supposedly the “most stable” according to Firmtek. But make sure the drives have “SSC” disabled.
Seagate Barracudas are also OK but some have problems mounting, and Firmtek is working closely with Seagate to find out why.
Firmtek’s tech support has been very helpful and informative.
Dean Sensui — http://www.HawaiiGoesFishing.com
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(1) Adding one internal drive will be the cheapest and simplest solution for you. DV is roughly 5 minutes per GB so if you need that much space, simply adding one 500gb drive will do it. Currently the 300gb drives are the cheapest per gb (you will pay twice that per gb for one 500gb drive). but you don’t need to purchase anything else for your current needs. Just slide it into the bay and connect the wires, no brackets or cards or extra wires are needed. Make sure you get a drive that is 7200 rpm or faster.
(2) Further down the road an external firewire drive would be handy and simple to add in. You can move data around with them easily.
(3) If you want some serious storage the external sata enclosures as mentioned above are hard to beat for performance and cost. A 2, 3, or 4 bay enclosure will allow you to have a ton of storage in raid configurations for safety or throughput. You can buy extra caddys ($20.00) for them to so you can keep extra drives on the shelf for hot swapping as needed. This system will take up one pci-x slot in the computer. Although it would be nice to fill it with 500gb drives you can save money by using cheap 250gb or 300gb drives in it as you can swap them as they fill up.
Any way you go you can’t loose by adding the internal drive into the mac first.
“everything is broken”
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