External Hard Disk Drive choice

[James Cude]

I haven’t seen the Kanex adaptor in action but I’d be kinda surprised if performance and reliability didn’t take a major hit going through that. If you really want to have USB and Thunderbolt connectivity- get a drive that has both. LaCie and GTECH both have some models with both interfaces.

[Eric Santiago]

Just ordered two empty Pegasus 2 4-Bay TB2 enclosures.
We have a few Mac Pro’s that have extra SATA drives to use.
I also successfully placed a few Apple Internal SSDs onto a Sonnet Tempo PCI SSD card which sits in a Magma ExpressBox 3RT chassis.
Have to remove the SSDs from the Apple SSD frame/rail system.
With the new Mac Pro’s, we needed to find homes for all them extra drives.

[Brian Thomas]

Many thanks again for all the advice. I’ve read enough negative things about Lacie, Promise is the wrong shape for me and I like the flexibility of both Thunderbolt and USB3. At a reasonable price (at the Apple Store) that seems to boil down to a G-Tech g-drive 4TB

https://www.g-technology.com/products/g-drive-thunderbolt

I’ll be back after a few good-sized multicam projects to share my experiences. Thanks again all.

FCPX and PPro 6. iMac 24 + MBP 17″. Near Geneva, Switzerland

[Brian Thomas]

Just in case it’s of interest: the G-drive was delivered in less than 24 hours and then I ran the DiskSpeedTest app to see what I’ve actually got:

HDD/connection Write Read
————– —————–
G-Drive 4TB/Thunderbolt 165MB/s 163MB/s
G-Drive 4TB/USB3 152MB/s 151MB/s
Cadigit AVDrive 2TB/USB3 66 63
Buffalo MiniStation 1TB/Thunderbolt 51 54
Buffalo MiniStation 1TB/USB3 45 51

Guess where my ‘fcpbundle’ will be located from now on…

FCPX and PPro 6. iMac 24 + MBP 17″. Near Geneva, Switzerland

[Gary Adcock]

[Brian Thomas] “G-Drive 4TB/Thunderbolt 165MB/s 163MB/s
G-Drive 4TB/USB3 152MB/s 151MB/s
Cadigit AVDrive 2TB/USB3 66 63”

Brian,
which Speed app did you test with? Those numbers seem pretty low across the board,except for the Buffalo units as they use really inexpensive drives in their enclosures.

I really like to remind people that you get what you pay for with Drives. Cheapest is not always the best thing.

gary adcock
Studio37

Post and Production Workflow Consultant
Production and Post Stereographer
Chicago, IL

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[Brian Thomas]

It was the BlackMagicDesign disk speed test. I just let it run for a minute or two before writing down the figures.

Anyway, I just thought I’d post those numbers as there are probably all sorts of people in my position who don’t want or need the very top tech but want to know what works lower down the scale.

FCPX and PPro 6. iMac 24 + MBP 17″. Near Geneva, Switzerland