best approch to increase disk space on PC?

[Gilles Gagnon]

after some research.. .here’s another good one!

https://www.amazon.com/Vantec-3-5-Inch-Aluminum-Removable-MRK-401ST-BK/dp/B003DVTWQ6/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1332539786&sr=1-1

Cheers,

Gilles

[Angelo Mike]

Never hot swap an esata drive. I made that mistake and had two hard drives crash. Shut down your computer, turn off the external drive if you have to, and then switch the hard drive out.

http://www.scenethroughglass.com

[Gilles Gagnon]

Thanks for sharing Angelo.

When you mean crash, do you mean “good for the garbage”? or the data (index file) was corrupt and you had to reformat? I realize that neither is good news but I’m curious.

I have a USB 2.0 dock with a sata drive in it and I can simply power the external unit down with its switch and swap it for another. This has never caused me any problems. I’m looking for something similar but faster access time than using USB2 interface, hence this thread.

Gilles

[Stephen Mann]

John – I use one of those for my boot drive. Mt docs and libraries are all on an internal D drive. Want a different O/S? Plug in a new drive.

OP – I have an external SATA docking drive on each of my editing PC’s connected through a USB2 port. Plenty fast for my HDV editing. Every project gets its own 1TB drive (prices are finally coming back down. Microcenter was advertising 1TB Seagate Barracudas for $99 last week.)

Advertised drive speed is absolutely meaningless for editing. The advertised speed is the “burst” data rate – how fast can you load or empty the RAM cache on the drive? The only spec that matters to editing due to the large file sizes is the sustained write speed. (Read speeds will always be faster).

RAID arrays are, in my opinion, a waste of money unless you are working with a really large, multi-terrabyte project – or uncompressed 4K HD media.

SSD drives read really fast, but are really slow at sustained write speeds. (Approaching Floppy speeds). Totally useless for editing.

Last – “Green” drives get that definition because they slow down or shut down completely after a brief period of no activity. Not something you want for a video file.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Gilles Gagnon]

Hi Dave and all others,

I bought one of these (very similar) but before I open the pkg (restocking fee if I do and return it) I have a question.

Is it truly hot swappable? I know it’s system dependent but I have a Dell XPS 435T and can’t tell if I’ll be able to hot swap it while the system is running?

Can anyone shed some light?

Cheers,

Gilles

[Dave Haynie]

[Gilles Gagnon] “Do you hot-swap yours with success? or do you always turn off you PC to switch HD?”

The SATA connection is designed to electrically allow hot-swap, and you find this well supported on RAID boxes. It’s easy to see…the GND pins are longer than the signal pins.

OS support is another story. Windows typically sets up any SATA drive as built-in, whether its internal SATA or eSATA. It’s pretty easy to un-mount a drive and remove it safely, but you can’t get the new drive recognized without the driver knowing that it’s a removable drive.

Sometimes you can get Windows 7 to support this. In the BIOS, the typical internal SATA port is configured in PATA-emulation mode, while the eSATA is often pre-defined to be in AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) mode. You probably need to set AHCI mode (in the BIOS, for those removable SATA drives) to maybe get Windows to support then as known-to-be-removable, and possibly indicate that the specific port is eSATA (the only actual difference will be the fact that it’s removable)… if you BIOS supports this. That allows you to remove them using the “Remove Hardware” tool, and more importantly, Windows will re-scan the drive at runtime if one is added, rather than only at boot time as with a fixed drive. This doesn’t always seem to work, though. On some PCs, the SATA vs. eSATA is locked into the BIOS based on port.

On a live system, though, switching the BIOS to ACHI may be an issue. Here’s a registry tweak to get Windows to re-evaluate the IDE vs. ACHI settings on reboot. In theory, anyway… you may or may not have the ACHI driver installed if you didn’t install Windows with it.
https://tweaks.com/windows/44119/improve-sata-hard-disk-performance-convert-from-ide-to-ahci/

AHCI isn’t a bad thing anyway, if your drivers and Windows version support it. AHCI enables SCSI-like command queuing and other performance improvements.

If this doesn’t work, and you need full hot-swap without rebooting, I’d go with USB3.0 these days (and yeah, I have USB 3.0 on both PCs, and a couple devices, but no HDDs yet, only USB 2.0 units).

-Dave

[Gilles Gagnon]

Thanks John,

I picked up an internal hot swap bracket but will have to return it. I’m using a Dell XPS 435T and would have to cut away some of the plastic front panel, defacing the PC.

I’ll return it and pickup an esata dock instead. I was hoping not to have yet another power adapter to the mix.

Thanks for your input, I’m now comfortable in going esata.

Gilles

[Gilles Gagnon]

Thanks Dave,

It was hard to tell if my system supports hot-swap. It’s not in the Dell specs that I can see, although they do refer to hot-swap bays. I don’t see any ‘safely remove hardware” icon tray so I’m baffled.

I’m going esata. 🙁

Gilles

[Kyle Arce]

Hi how do I delete sony vidoe files to free up my disk space?thanks

[Mike Kujbida]

[kyle arce] “Hi how do I delete sony vidoe files to free up my disk space?thanks”

Empty your recycle bin?