BEST Portable USB disk drive

[John Fishback]

While USB is okay for file transfer, it’s not okay as a video edit drive. That might change with USB3. That said, look to your left and right on the Cow and you’ll see adds from drive manufacturers. Some have Firewire drives. All the advertisers are reputable companies who stand behind their products.

John

MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.8 QT7.6.4 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870, 24″ TV-Logic Monitor, ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
FCS 3 (FCP 7.0.2, Motion 4.0.2, Comp 3.5.2, DVDSP 4.2.2, Color 1.5.2)

Pro Tools HD w SYNC IO & 192 Digital I/O, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neumann U87, Schoeps Mk41 mics, Genelec Monitors, PrimaLT ISDN

[Dave Johnson]

Just to expand a little on John’s good advice, FireWire is preferable for video work because it provides steady streams of data transfer (when reading & writing files). I’m not an IT guy so I can’t explain this with the proper terminology, but the concept is simple … USB transfers data in bursts instead of steady streams, which causes issues for video work … not sure if that has changed with USB3.

In case this is what you were asking, its fine to use USB drives to simply transfer video files from one place to another … just not as a source drive for video software. I have a 30Gb key-shaped LaCie drive that I use for exactly that purpose … everybody makes them now and they’re all about the same.

[Jim Edds]

I use this one, cheap and FW800 https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?Ntt=WEPSTD8500&N=0&InitialSearch=yes

MBP I7 2.66 8GB RAM, 140GB SSD, FCP 7

[Michael Sacci]

I doubt if USB3 will come to the Mac, Steve Job doesn’t like it (for whatever reason) and if Steve doesn’t like it we are stuck. I think we are waiting for FW5600000000 or something like that.