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External drive recommendation needed
I have a 2010 Mac Pro and my director has a current model Macbook Pro (non-retina, so it still has fw). I already have a hard drive I will be editing from (GSpeed ES Pro), but what I am looking for is a hard drive recommendation for the director. He likes to do rough edits and I am going to try to have him do this with proxy files, although he may end up wanting the HD prores files.
I originally was going to have him get the 3tb Seagate GoFlex desk firewire drive with thunderbolt adapter, that way he could have a fast connection on his computer and i could still plug it into mine when needed. I also liked that the drive wasn’t too big, so easily portable. But I am reading that there are a lot of sleep issues with these drives and I will need to sync files with him, probably when he is not actively using his computer. And he’s not mac savvy enough to be dealing with troubleshooting that. I’ve also thought about usb3 but I’ve heard that has sleep issues as well with Lion.
So since it doesn’t seem there’s any other drive out there that has both firewire and thunderbolt connectivity, any suggestions on what’s best for this workflow? Should I just have him get a thunderbolt drive and if I need to put stuff on his drive, load it onto a little firewire drive and to the data transfer on his computer? Or should I have him get a firewire drive since he will be doing simple edits?
and then there’s the long term question-
The director will be the keeper of all of the media once the film is finished (and also having the thunderbolt/firewire debate with that). So I’m not sure whether the drive he uses to edit will be a part of this solution or whether that will be a separate purchase (since a gspeed Q or something is not so portable). And I know regular hard drives in general aren’t the best for long term backup (LTO or ssd are better in the longterm) but its not in the budget so we do what we can.I imagine he would come back to me with the backup drive if there was something that needed to be done with it in the future. I know there are rumblings about a thunderbolt – firewire adapter but apparently that is only for connecting a thunderbolt computer port to a firewire drive, not a firewire computer to a thunderbolt drive. So I’m not sure what the future holds for connecting my Mac Pro to thunderbolt, but I’m sure down the road I would have a computer that could connect to thunderbolt.
I appreciate any thoughts or suggestions!
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3 Replies
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Looks like he would be a good candidate for the NewerTech Voyager Q drive dock. All he needs to do is add a bare hard drive. All this and other external solutions can be found at Other World Computing (macsales.com)
Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Vice President
Chicago Creative Pro Users Group -
Good thought for long term. Great for me, not so great for him I think. If I’m going to get a firewire drive, I’d rather get one that is enclosed so that it is less intimidating for him as he’s not very tech savvy, and also more portable. Thanks for the thought. I’ll keep it in mind.
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I’m a big fan of G-Technology external drives. Simple to use. Incredibly reliable. I have stacks of them and feel they just can’t be beat.
Jim
Jim Carswell
Spyhop Productions, Inc.
Savannah, GA
http://www.spyhopproductions.com
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