Hard Drives

[Shane Ross]

For what sort of media? DV? HDV? Uncompressed SD?

I am a fan of G-Raids by G-Technology…and of the Firewire VR by CalDigit.

But I also hear great things about the Mercury Elite Pro drives from http://www.otherworldcomputing.com.

Shane

Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net

[Walter Biscardi]

Have you searched this forum? Hundreds of recommendations out there as this question is asked every week.

I like LaCie and the original G-RAIDs.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Shane Ross]

Oh, yes. The ORIGINAL G-Raids (with PATA drives). The new ones are fine alone, but once you start daisy chaining….performance drop. Isn’t that true for all of the newer firewire drives? Daisy chaining issues?

Shane

Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net

[Rj Miles]

I have been running the 500GB SATA Maxtor Maxline Enterprise server drives for a number of years without incident.

I have used them on the internal drive in the G5 and now Mac Pro. I also use them the Sonnet Fusion eSATA drive bays as solo drives as well as (2) drive striped RAIDs.

OWC has great prices on the drives, better than I had seen from a less trust worthy Ebay sellers.

I did have a problem with one drive a year ago, in that it would not format/initialize. Maxtor replaced it over night, using a credit card for security until they received back the problem drive.

It’s always good practice to clone back system volumes and storage of important project data. With these drive costing just over $100, it’s easy to have double drives of important stuff.

happy shopping

[James Mulryan]

At NAB 2007 La Cie rep told me all drives are the same, Hitachi, Seagate, Maxtor, WD.
Warning Will Robinson, Warning, not all drives are the same. Weibe Tech seems pretty rock solid. GTECH solid, but expensive. Seagate makes Enterprise drives designed for RAID use. about $40 more per drive for a 500 G drive Newegghead.

[Dr. Crestwood]

Anything but lacie. Almost anyone who tells you lacie drives are reliable is a sales rep for them.

[Eric Klassen]

To answer your questions as best as I can:
Will be editing with DV.
I’ve done some limited searching on the site, but mostly came up with too much info to effectively navigate through.
I haven’t heard of any of those outlets before, I was thinking of going with egghead or buy.com. I’ll check out those other sites.

As always, thanks for your ideas. All of you are amazing.

Eric

[Walter Biscardi]

[Shane Ross] “Isn’t that true for all of the newer firewire drives? Daisy chaining issues?”

Not the LaCie’s or the CalDigit Firewire VR’s, though I would never run more than two of those VR’s in a single chain.

I have two older model G-RAID’s and a LaCie 2TB unit in a single chain and have zero issues with that one. Sometimes we throw on a fourth drive via the FW-800 port on the front of the machine AND capture DVCPro HD via Firewire and the Mac Pro handles all of that just fine.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[John Foley]

[James Mulryan] ”

At NAB 2007 La Cie rep told me all drives are the same, Hitachi, Seagate, Maxtor, WD”

AhHa! Of course a rep fro LaCie would say that. But, it Ain’t really true. If they were all the same, why would there be different manufacturers of hard drives? Tell me, why are Maxtor drives consistently cheaper than the others? Why does Seagate still offer 5 year warranties on ALL their drives when Western Digital and Hitachi don’t?

Now all drives are made the same but design quality is the difference. From my experience, Seagate, Western Digital and IBM (now Hitachi) drives were all excellent quality. Maxtor – Connor (any one remember them?) were less than quality. Hitachi bought IBM’s disk drive business just as Lenovo has bought the IBM laptop business.

But I digress!

Please visit http://www.thefinalcutstore.com for all your Final Cut needs.

[Walter Biscardi]

[FinalOne] ”
AhHa! Of course a rep fro LaCie would say that. But, it Ain’t really true. If they were all the same, why would there be different manufacturers of hard drives? Tell me, why are Maxtor drives consistently cheaper than the others? Why does Seagate still offer 5 year warranties on ALL their drives when Western Digital and Hitachi don’t?”

Because some companies have a higher tolerance for what is acceptable and what is not. Med