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Do good hard drives exist?
Hi,
For the past few days I’ve been doing my research into FW 800 hard drives to use for video editing with FCP and motion graphics work with After Effects. The footage I will be using will range from SD, DVCPRO HD, XDCAM, and some ProRes 422.
I narrowed it down to the Lacie D2 Quadra, G-Drive, and the new Caldigit AV Drive. Unfortunately, the Lacie and G-Drive got 50/50 reviews. The bad reviews always seem to be from people who have had it for a couple months while the new reviews seem to be from people who have used it for a week or two. So that doesn’t really help.
That leaves the Caldigit AV Drive. I haven’t seen a single user review of this, perhaps because it is new. So I figured I might just give it a try. But just my luck, Caldigit doesn’t ship to Canada. Yay.
I’m not looking for a RAID or anything because it is out of my budget, just a good, stable, FW800 drive to work off of, as I am currently working off my internal startup drive for the past few days which is a no-no.
Any suggestions? Do ‘good’ drives even exist? Just get a G-Drive? Just get a Lacie? Just bite the bullet and get a RAID ($500 or under)?
Thanks in advance.
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22 Replies
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Why not get a decent bare enclosure and buy your own drives?
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Thanks for the reply Jeremy.
I have had some bad experiences with getting my own enclosures and hard drives. I like the fact that I can read the product descriptions of a hard drive and it says something along the lines of “optimized for video editing”. Just getting an enclosure and hard drives is almost a risk since I will be using it on a daily basis and would want to make sure I spend money on the right thing!
Now I won’t rule out buying an enclosure+hard drive if you would kindly point me in the right direction. Brands? Some basic knowledge I should know about when buying these kinds of things? All I know is that it needs FW800 and has to be 7200rpm, other than that, I’m pretty clueless.
Thanks again.
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I’ve had more ‘commercial’ enclosures go bad than one offs.
Especially LaCie and GTech. The drive is usually fine, it’s just the enclosures that die.
Brands? China cheap?
Pick your price point. You can get Sata drives from there too.
You won’t get a raid for 500 or under. When you’re ready, I think the D400QR5 from Sonnet is nifty. Raid 5 built right in to the enclosure.
Jeremy
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try https://eshop.macsales.com.
from enclosures to fairly inexpensive raids. good service.
just do a search for what you want at that site and you’ll get some good choices. All brands of hard drives might fail. Sooner or later they all do. Back up important stuff. Buy drives that are fast enough to handle your video.
OSX 10.5.7; MAC Book PRO (EARLY 2008); Camcorders: Sony Z7U, Canon HV30, Sony vx2000/PD170, Canon xl2; Pana, Sony, and Canon consumer cams; FCP certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.
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I asked something similar in the Color forum and got some interesting answers:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/223/17841
If you use a really cheap enclosure, it might cause problems, but check reviews and get something not too cheap, and it’ll be OK.
Rodrigo.
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Some people seem to love getting angry. I don’t 🙂 -
Thanks for the help guys.
So I looked into some enclosures and hard drives. Unless someone says otherwise, the OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro looks like a good enclosure and I have some trust in them since that’s where I got my RAM and so far so good.
OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Enclosure:
https://bit.ly/PEBHuI was thinking of filling it with a WD Cavier Black from Canada Computers:
https://bit.ly/9uUYJDSo that could be an option as well. On the other hand, looking through the forums, Caldigit has gotten a lot of praise for their products. I emailed some of their online suppliers for prices 🙂
Thanks guys.
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I like OWC stuff, well made and great service but drives go bad, you need to have a backup in place. WD Black Cav are my first choice in drives. I would never buy a LaCie drive, I have had too much trouble with the few I have used and everyone I know that uses them has had trouble.
That enclosure is a lot faster if you have a eSata card in your computer.
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I have 14 of these 1 TB. Only problem was a bad power supply and they immediately RMA’d the power supply and sent me a new one. They are a great company.
Warren Eig
O 310-470-0905email: warren@babyboompictures.com
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check out: https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/ME8Q7T20GB64/for about $50 more.
OSX 10.5.7; MAC Book PRO (EARLY 2008); Camcorders: Sony Z7U, Canon HV30, Sony vx2000/PD170, Canon xl2; Pana, Sony, and Canon consumer cams; FCP certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.
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My faves for FW800 and multi port connections is WiebeTech RTX series. Trayless chassis for raw drives from 1 to 8 drive slots. These things just work and I’ve been a fan of their products for quite some time.
https://www.wiebetech.com/home.php
We run the 200 and 400 series boxes here solely for archiving projects after we’re done as we run 48TB of SAS/SATA storage for editing. But these units are well suited for video editing as well.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
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