Cheap?…Maybe

[Chris Poisson]

Regarding LaCie,

As Joachim said, they seem to go through cycles. I have 5 or six of their drives, one is a 5 year old 30 gig, seem to be all rock solid. On the other hand, last fall I bought a 500 gig Big Disk Extreme and it died in 2 weeks. And I had a 60 gig and a 120 gig FireWire 400 drives die on me at a place I used to work.

If you want a rock-solid FireWire 800 RAID, I highly recommend the two drive FireMax enclosures from Promax, you cannot get more reliable support from anyone.

[Mat @ lacie]

Hello Steve,
Here are some info that will help you:
– LaCie Big Disk Extreme 500GB supports everything from DV to 10bit SD uncompressed (including HDV and DVCPro HD)
– LaCie Bigger Disk Extreme (1TB, 1.6TB or 2TB) supports everything from DV to 10bit SD uncompressed (including HDV and DVCPro HD)
– LaCie Biggest F800 (4 drives RAID tower with hardware raid controller for Raid 0, 0+1, 5 and 5+hot spare – 1TB, 1.6TB or 2TB) supports everything from DV to 8bit SD uncompressed (including HDV and DVCPro HD)

For HD uncompressed, SATA is a reliable solution. We started to ship our external d2 SATA last month. There are other solutions in the market that are performing very well.

Hope this helps.
Mat @ LaCie
mgasquy@lacie.com

[James Sullivan]

I have the Terabyte drive. It is great for massive amount of DV. It is too noisy. It sounds like an 747 taking off when it goes to cool itself down. I would go with a g-raid at this point in time for SD work.
James

[Oliver Peters]

[Walter Biscardi] “You had them striped together and both running off the single FW card? That will result in pretty slow performance vs. one drive connected to the Mac FW800 Port and the second connected to the FW card.”

Walter,

You are correct in your configuration. This isn’t my installation so I agree that running both drives from a single 2-ch. card isn’t much of an advantage. In fact the LaCie folks told the owner that he should really get 2 single-channel cards and run each drive off of a separate card and stripe them that way. Nevertheless, they have had success with uncompressed 8-bit SD, 1080/23.98 DVCProHD and 720/59.94 DVCProHD. Personally I wouldn’t guarantee it – and maybe they just happen to have a better set of LaCies – but it did seem to work flawlessly in my working with it.

On the other hand, I saw a few posts about SATAs and I would highly caution against them. So far from everything I saw at NAB, it is still a moving target and most of the early solutions I’ve seen appear to be low budget crap (connections, power supply, etc.). Wait a few months for some more solid offerings from G-Tech, Medea, Huge and others.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com