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Looking for recommendation on external Hard Drives
I am still fairly new to the video editing world, but already find myself out of storage. I will be purchasing a desk top computer properly configured in the next few months.
Until then I am still running Vegas off a laptop and firewire.
Any recommendation on the best external drive to get? I have 2 other external drives – can I daisy chain them or should I direct connect?
Mainly looking for external drive recommendations.
Thanks in advance for your help
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10 Replies
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I’ve tried various brands and kits.
I have had the most success and most consistent results with the Quantegy firewire drives. They are a bit more than others, being the namebrand of high quality studio tape products, but they come with a hard carrying case.
You might find something else works just as well for you. Whatever the case, make sure you are checking the specifics of the HD in the case…that’s the most important part. Speed and access time is key.
Marc Bowyer
StrobeAlific Media -
I have 4 Maxtor 250 Gig drives that have performed flawlessly over the past year.
I do Daisy chain them together sometimes and all works well.
Paul
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I have 2 Western Digital 7200 USB2 drives that never give me a problem. I have even captured to them without dropped frames. Have had them for almost 2 years. I use WD Spindown/Stop utility. I have never used firewire drives.
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I have been very happy with my USB 2.0 Western Digital external drives, especially my 200 gig one with 8 megs of RAM. In two years of heavy use, it has never missed a beat. I did have problems with Maxtors when I put them in ADS Drive enclosures. I also had a Maxtor fail on my main computer.
Hope this helps.
Grasshopper
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I’d avoid Maxtors as well. After years of using them without problems, I’ve had 2 go down recently (160GB & 200GB IDE 133). Seems that the new 1 year warranty drives- as opposed to the old 3 year warranty ones- are really shoddy.
Just my .02.
Ken -
You didn’t say anything about your budget but if you have to watch your money you can buy external cases on pricewatch.com and install your own hard drives in those. People talk about different brands of cases but I’ve had very good luck with the cheap cases. They aren’t exactly rocket science any more and all seem to handle the big drives now.
If you think you will be going to use DV Rack on a laptop (a great program for recording directly to the hard drive AND a field monitor) be sure you get firewire drives or cases that are both firewire and USB. It is a communication thing and is firewire is recommended over USB. However, you cannot chain the firewire with the camera. You need a second firewire (IRQ reasons) but cards for laptops with firewire are less than $20.
I don’t know if this information is anything you want but it has been helpful to me.
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Hello
You also didn’t say whether you’re looking for a portable laptop HD or externals for your main computer. There’s a big difference. Especially using a laptop in the field where you don’t have electric available. If you always have electric available then you can use any external Fire Wire drive.For my laptop, which I have DV Rack on, I have a 2.5″ Hitachi 5400rpm 80Gb. I have it inside a aluminum “travel” case. This case is powered by my USB-2 ports and data transfers via the Firewire. As mentioned above, my camera plugs into the 4 pin IEEE-1394 port on the laptop and for the HD I bought a Firewire PCMCIA card 6 pin. I also have an N-Charge external battery for my laptop as the Toshiba laptop’s don’t have good battery time, but they’re powerful computers. Mine’s an A75-S229 3.2GhZ-P4.
Camera Cable
https://www.controlcable.com/details/item.asp?id=32270034|31133|Hard drive case
https://www.xpcgear.com/ufe201.htmlHD
https://www.xpcgear.com/hitachi08k0639.htmlFor my main computers I am currently using Maxtor Personal Storage 200gB Firewire. They are daisy chained and work good. I would not buy these again as 1 has already been replaced by warrantee and these drives do not spin down and shut off when the computer is off. Newer ones turn off.
If I’m not going to use them for a few days I pull the plug.
Personally I’ve not had good luck capturing DV using the USB-2 ports. I’ve been told that the Fire Wire is actually faster for DV but I won’t get into an arguement here about that. My personal preference is IEEE-1394 for DV work.
Allen
My web site features;
China, China Railways and music.
https://www.azagel.comVideo site;
https://www.asxmediaproductions.com -
Thanks for the detail and links. I was a little tentative because I wasn’t real sure what the original poster wanted but it sounds like your and my interests are similar. I’ve always had available power in the past but expect to start a project soon that will require a setup like you outlined.
I did have one thing come up recently that I didn’t understand. My laptop is a Sony Viao I’ve had a couple of years with an AMD chip. When I added the firewire card the computer kept rebooting when I tried the external hard drive there but works perfectly fine with the hard drive in the laptop’s original port and the camera connected through the card. Anyone have an idea why this might be?
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Allen –
Thank you for the great info. I shot a 2 hour presentation using a HP AMD laptop, DV Rack and a USB 2.0 connection to an external self-powered Hitachi 5400 40 gig hard drive. This setup worked great – not a single dropped frame and I could edit directly on the hard drive. I was pretty impressed. I did buy an external 3 port firewire PCMIA card but have not tried to use it yet.
It was good to learn about the N-Charge external batteries. I have never heard of them and face the same problem as you with short battery life. I’m glad to hear there is an option other than buying another laptop battery.
Again, thank you for the information and links.
Grasshopper
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You’re welcome. That N Carge is available at Best Buy for about $150 plus you have to get the plug adapter kit for $10 that matches your laptop. I had to recycle mine about 4 or 5 times to get it to hold a full charge though.
Specs say it gives you up to 5 hours extra battery time but doing DV with it powering a HD, I gues about 2 or 3 extra hours. My test shoots with it were only about 1 1/2 hours. First time it didn’t make it. Second time it did. Now after 4 recycles, the charge lights are still on after 2 days of leting it sit.
That 80Gb HD gives me about 4-5 hours of DV. I can buy a few more if I need as they weren’t too expensive.
AllenMy web site features;
China, China Railways and music.
https://www.azagel.comVideo site;
https://www.asxmediaproductions.com
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