External Hard Drives

[Terry Esslinger]

BTW – DV and HDV are both about 13GB per hour. HDV does not take up more space until you start to edit (depending on your editing flow).

Terry Esslinger

[Steve Rhoden]

Hey Ralph,
A Western Digital 2TB: 7200rpm: External firewire Drive sounds good to me. Did some looking into raid configurations recently and its not really something i would be too quick to recommend.

Steve Rhoden
Creative Director
TNX EFFECTS STUDIOS.

[Allen Zagel]

Hi
Also stay away from USB. It’s the slowest of the bunch. Most all newer computers today have SATA drives which are fast. You can also get a eSATA card and use eSATA which is actually faster then FW.

On my Mac Book Pro I have a LaCie 500gb external drive. It has connections for all the outputs. USB, FW400, FW800 (Mac Only) & eSATA. In looking at the specs for all of them I opted to use the eSATA and it’s great.

As far as brands, everyone has their favorites. Mine being LaCie and Seagate. I have the Seagate external on my PC’s as well as WD My Books and only 1 Maxtor left. It seems for me, I run through 1 or 2 WD and Maxtors a year but never had any problems with the 2 I mentioned.

Allen

ASX Media Group, Inc.
https://www.asxvideo.com

[Ron Shook]

Ralph,

[Ralph Hajik] “What’s everyone out there using now a days and what to look for when buying a hard drive? One last question, do I really need raid ?”

This is just a suggestion for something that seems to me should be very valuable to we video cutting types and I don’t know why it hasn’t taken us by storm, but instead of purchasing external hard drives and ending up with a rat’s nest of of odd shapes and sizes and wall warts, get removeable devices that take bare 3.5 inch SATA drives, no sleds to attach or fool with, like this:

https://cooldrives.stores.yahoo.net/quswsamorafo.html
The link is for a 5″ slot carrier for your computer case but they can be added to any external carrier with an open front that’ll take SATA devices or purchased from CoolDrives in 1-5 slot external JBOD or Raid cases that attach by one or more of eSata, USB, Firewire 400 or 800. That way you’ve got one device, one power supply and if you need additional space you just slide out one bare drive that’s full and pop in another. Do a search on the site for “Quick Swap” and you’ll see all the possibilities listed.

With these devices you simply purchase the bare 3.5″ SATA drive of your choice, make sure the jumpers are correct and slide them in. Like Allen I’m partial to Seagate. In 20 years going back to monster double height 9GB SCSI drives, the original Barracuda, I’ve only had one die on me, well 2, if I count a 4.5GB used one I got cheap that had probably been ridden hard in a server. I am very careful about proper cooling, so my experience is a bit of luck and good construction.

About the raid thing. To physically edit DV or HDV, it’s not really necessary. To stay sane if your one drive goes down and you’re under the gun, yes. And it will happen sometime and it’s never the right time. OK, if you’re editing for fun, but not if you’re editing for a living. The simplest raid is raid 1 where what is written to one drive is mirrored to another, so that if one goes down the other can continue to carry the load without problem. It takes twice as much drive space but drives are cheap now. This is good practice for your system drive as well, particularly if you don’t clone your system drive periodically, although few do it. BTW, if you happen to go a file based camcorder that records to solid state memory that you reuse all the time, and don’t backup or raid during post, you are God’s own fool. Never leave your only source on one hard drive. Two hard drives are pretty safe, and any other form of back up is either quite slow or quite expensive.

Good luck,

Ron Shook

Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
CreativeCOW Forum Host for Discreet edit*