Final Cut Pro with External HDDs

[Lee Berger]

Your external drives are probably formatted as FAT32. This is compatible with both OS X and Windows, but has a 4 GB file size limit. I suggest you try reformatting as Mac OS X Extended (but not the journaled option).

Lee Berger
http://www.leebergermedia.com

[Walter Biscardi]

[kilamunkyz] “I have an Power Mac G5 Quad with 4 external Maxtor hard drives, all the same model. When I attempt to export media or render files in FCP to HDD 1 & 2 and the media is over a certain size, then it will not work. On drives 3 & 4 I do not have this problem.

I am aware that there is a possibility that the drives are differently formatted, which would explain the problem, but surely when rendering on drives 1 & 2, it would just create multiple render files rather than one short one and then stopping.”

First off, if you have four drives daisy chained together off your machine, that’s too many. Fewer, larger drives work better than more, smaller drives.

All drives should be formatted Mac OS Extended. Sounds like your two drives have Windows formatting and won’t write larger than 2GB. No, it will not create multiple render files for a single clip unless you manually stop the render process. Your best bet is to move the media off those drives, reformat, and move the media back.

Finally, Maxtor is not a recommended brand for video editing. They’re great for backup, but for video editing I would highly recommend G-TECH, LaCie, Cal Digit, Medea and Ciprico as they make A/V centric devices that are built for the constant abuse of video editing.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Lee Berger]

[walter biscardi] “Sounds like your two drives have Windows formatting and won’t write larger than 2GB.”

The FAT32 file size limit is 4GB.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table
https://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/reskit/prork/prdf_fls_pxjh.mspx?mfr=true

Lee Berger
http://www.leebergermedia.com

[Jerry Hofmann]

Doesn’t matter. The OP needs to reformat those drives if they’re not HFS+.

Jerry

[Tom Matthies]

[walter biscardi] “Finally, Maxtor is not a recommended brand for video editing.”

Hi Walter. For what it’s worth, yesterday our ProTools guy was having a problem with one of his Lacie “Porche” drives. It looks like the Firewire card inside the drive went south. Since it was out of warranty, I opened up the enclosure to remove the drive in order to transplant it into his G4 directly. Guess what? The drive in question was in fact a Maxtor drive. Hmmm….
Tom

[Jeremy Doyle]

I had a LaCie D2 250 that was accidently dropped causing it to quit working and when I opened it up it also had a maxtor drive. I tried the drive in another case to determine if the drop caused the case or the drive to fail only to find it was both. I then sent the drive in to maxtor as they had a three warranty on that particular drive and they replaced it. As a LaCie drive it was out of warranty.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Lee Berger] “The FAT32 file size limit is 4GB.”

That’s Windows Format. You must format with the Mac OS.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[David Roth weiss]

[walter biscardi] “Finally, Maxtor is not a recommended brand for video editing.”

Walter,

I’m sorry, but that is a very broad statement that covers an awful lot of bases, and it has absolutely no basis in fact. In addition, it certainly has no bearing on this user’s issue.

Maxtor makes many different types of hard drives, from consumer models right on up through mission critical enterprise level drives that are as good as any hard drives on the market. Maxtor drives are used in nearly every manfacturers enclosures and drive arrays, including many of the brands you mentioned. In addition, Maxtor provides the SATA system drives that are built in to a very high percentage of the computers built and sold by Apple.

Don’t just take my word for it, check out reviews on Barefeats, Storagereview, Bigbruin, PCstats, AMUG and others. You will find for instance that Maxtor’s Maxline series of SATA drives outperform almost every other brand, they carry a five year waaraty, and they have MTBF (mean time between failures) of one-million hours. They are excellent drives for video editing.

All hard drive manufacturers make and sell entry level enclosures with consumer level drives inside that may not be ideal for the rigors of video editing, and Maxtor like all the others is no exception. However, your blanket generalization above characterizes the entire Maxtor line as inferior for video editing, and that is simply wrong. More importantly, your statement seems to imply that some higher power has “recommended” against Maxtor drives, when in fact it is you who are recommending against them.

We all have favorite brands, and none of us is without bias toward those brands we trust and away from the others we don’t, however, when your face goes up top on a forum it is important that your audience be able to distinquish facts versus your personal opinion. Clearly, this is one of those times when that line has been blurred.

If you can find any evidence that supports your statement please do publish it here Walter and I will be the very first to acknowledge it and to apologize to you. I look forward to seeing if you can find anything on the subject.

All the best,
DRW

[Lee Berger]

[walter biscardi] “That’s Windows Format. You must format with the Mac OS.”

That’s correct. But I believe most of those Maxtor drives come formatted FAT32, which mount and can be written to in OS X. That’s where people get into trouble. Even more so if they have used it as a scratch drive for a while and then have to backup a lot of media prior to reformating. Interestingly enough I just purchased a 1TB Maxtor (two 500 GB in a single external case, formated RAID 0) to backup media as I reformatted my XServe RAID. The Maxtor came unformatted. At $560.00 it’s a great backup value.

Lee Berger
http://www.leebergermedia.com

[Dave Vickers]

Thanks everybody for replying. I am quite fortunate to have a Lacie drive as well which I have just deleted lots of media on, so I will copy the media on to the Lacie drive and format the other drives.

I have one other question though.Why is it important that I reformat the drives to Mac OS X extended rather than Journalled? My other 2 drives that work properly are formatted Mac OS X Journalled, could you tell me the difference?

Thanks again

Dave