External Hard Drives plug play versus software

[David Roth weiss]

The firewire drive you’re asking about is not a brand of hard drive, but rather a branded enclosure containing another manufacturer’s hard drive, most likely Maxtor, Seagate, Hitachi, or Western Digital. Those hard drives are all just fine, and I’m sure that the enclosure won’t be an issue for you.

The concept of “plug and play” that you mention really is a term used only on PCs running a Microsoft OS, it has no bearing or meaning to you on the MAC platform. Your drive will undoubtedly arrive formatted for the PC, as almost every drive does, except LaCie and a few others, and it will require formating as “MAC Extended” using the Apple Disk Utility before you begin using it. That’s about a two second process that even a chimpanzee can do, so don’t sweat it…

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

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[Walter Biscardi]

[Happy fish] “It was explained to us when we set the system up that there are external drives with preloaded existing software that can interupt or corrupt Final Cut software. We have also been advised plug and plays are the only types of drives we should be using.”

Have never heard of this in my 6 years of running FCP or even in my experience running non-linear editing systems since 1995.

Maxtor is actually not really a recommended manufacturer for editing. Backup, sure, but not for day to day editing. We only have two of them and we only use them for backing up our primary arrays.

Regardless of the hard drive you purchase, whether or not it is “plug and play” and shows up on your desktop when you purchase it, you should always format the drive from your system before you do anything with it.

Disk Utility > Select that hard drive > Erase > Mac OS Extended.

This gives you a nice clean format from your own system and removes any junk that the hard drive manufacturer may have put on there and also ensures that its formatted with the exact same OS as you are running.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Michael Sacci]

I have several Rocstor drives. They are good drives but over priced in my opinion. I only buy them when I forgot to order OWC drives and I have to have them. Like the others say once they are reformatted they just show up.