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Editing on an Esata vs USB external drive
Hi all, I’d like to find out if anyone here has ever edited on Premiere with the video files being on both an Esata and USB external drive and if there is any fundamental difference, to you, with the speed of seek time of the project files on first opening the project and in any other areas of editing.
I’d like to know because their may be an issue with my laptop and its ability to use its Esata plug to its fullest and I would possibly have to send back the laptop for a replacement.
I would like to get an idea of the difference so I can determine whether to make this exchange in the near future (if it is extremely different and better) or later on down the road (if there isn’t any real difference).
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9 Replies
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There should be a fundamental difference in performance when using an eSATA disk versus a usb disk. You should have approx. the same performance (on eSATA) like when using an internal regular SATA desktop/laptop disk, you cannot get more than 18-20 mb/s read/write on usb and its not recommended for doing any editing, it just doesn’t cut it.
However, my experience using eSATA has been less than satisfactory. Although I have achieved the same speeds as single desktop drives, the implementation lacks. The cables are flimsy and not made for people on the move. The connector is unreliable, drivers (windows) are most of the time horrible and most of the hardware vendors making eSATA chips have bad (although I’m not sure about G-Tech’s eSATA card) implementations, eSATA disks don’t like it when machines go to sleep and all hell breaks loose when you wake the computer. Oh! and you cannot “safely remove” the device, you have to close the computer or risk data by closing the disk.
Bottom line is eSATA is not made for anything external and is especially not made for people who want a reliable connection and their data to be safe in any way, or want to be on the move. I’ve stick to FW800 for external disks and never had any problems. It’s no wonder that Apple never implemented this connection natively in its machines.
If you are experiencing low performance when using eSATA, you may want to check on your disk. Is it full? Have you ran a disk speed test?
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Hmmm, I haven’t used Esata to any extent since my laptop needs be checked out to use it.
And I agree, USB is no way to edit, its extremely slow and I noticed it as I use Premiere on a powerful machine yet have to wait as much as 6 minutes for a big project to load. Not cool.
Well, I already purchased this Esata drive so I should use it, even with the limitations you speak of. However, I will ensure when I purchase a new system (a desktop for editing), it will have the capability of using firewire ports for the hard drives.
But thank you for your response.
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We use external eSATA drives with a USB connection. No big problems. Some machines have up to 4 drives going at a time.
Is it the optimal storage solution? Probably not, but we manage to get our work done pretty efficiently. We do SD and HDV. On HDV throughput is a bit sluggish, but good enough for basic editing. I will use internal SATA drives when more bandwidth is required.
I too have had mixed results with external eSATA cables. Mainly the problem has been inability to unmount a drive without rebooting computer.
Mike Cohen -
The difference between USB and eSATA is tremendous.
However, if you are editing DV or HDV footage, a USB external drive works fine (on a PC, USB on a Mac is dumbed down, forcing you to get FW400 or FW800 drives.)
The latest Macs do have external sATA ports and g-raid makes a very fast raid drive for MAcs.
I use eSata (II) for all my editing. I have hard drive docks and buy raw drives cheap and am able to edit many formats up to XDCAM, P2 and AVCHD. I like this because when the job is done,I can put the project hard drive on the shelf and there it sits till the client come to pick it up – if ever. At $50 for a 500GB Drive it’s easy to wrap that into the cost of editing. -
Now I edit a lot of footage that ends up in the region of 3-4 hours worth of footage in the project file. Whenever I load up the project files it takes almost 5 minutes to load the project. Can this be attributed to the speed of the USB drive?
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Sadly – no. This long load time is a problem Adobe had better work out pretty soon or even a loyal customer and fan like me will have to recommend FCP for edits that have lots of footage. You can turn off XMP and Metadata Linking in Preferences/Media and it might help a little, but I have projects that take 15 minutes to load and I’ve just had to adapt. I t really stinks when you go to export to AME and have to wait for the project to load there.
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So why is it the projects take so long to load as compared to Final Cut, that apparently can load multiple projects at a time?
Has this been narrowed down to anything in particular, even speculation perhaps?
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I have to disagree with previous posters who complained about eSata.
I use ONLY eSata and there is an immense perk in performance compared to USB.What many people don’t check – and therefore complain about hot swap/sleep problems – is that to make full use of eSata features you should have AHCI enabled in your BIOS, regarding your hard drive controller. If this is active, is simply works!
good luck, n.m.
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Well, I’ll be the judge for myself. I’m getting an expresscard eSata port soon and then I will determine how much of a difference it makes. If it makes a huge difference, I’ll love it. I love premiere but things like the long load times just make me want to go the way of Final Cut Pro.
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