Hard Drives>> SATA 3.0Gb/s Firewire A/B

[Alex Jusay]

Both hard drives, internal or external will work fine if your working on DV footage. However, for HD work, you’re better with the internal one, as there are a lot of possible bottlenecks with external drives.

[Harm Millaard]

In general SATA drives are at least twice as fast as firewire drives and nearly three times as fast as USB drives. If you prefer external drives, look for e-SATA drives.

Harm Millaard

[Blast1]

[solagratia77] “Would I see much speed improvement by using 3.0Gb/s enabled hard drives over external Firewire HDD?”
In most cases internal drives are faster and less expensive, also in your question are you refering to just the drive speed or other system increases?

[Solagratia77]

Thank you everybody !

The thing that made me hesitant to get the internal HDD
was the fact that I only have 500W power supply.

Well I guess 500W would be sufficient for most
configurations.

However I am running 2x Opteron 275s dualcore +
Quadro 3450 + two HDDs already.

So I was worrying what if …by adding another
HDD would make my system unstable.

Inadequate power supply = unstable, right?

So before I click that “Place your Order”
button can anybody confirm that
it is OK to add another HDD to my system?

Thanks again for all your help.

-J
SolaGratia

[Harm Millaard]

Check the power consumption of all your components, separating them into the various voltage rails (3.3, 5 and 12V) and compare these with the output of your PS. If you get to the limit by adding another internal HD, you may consider getting a somewhat more powerfull PS, like for instance a Thermaltake PurePower or SilentPower 680.

To establish power consumption, use the support pages of the various suppliers. You can also check Tom’s Hardware and do a search on powersupplies. They have some good guidelines on how to establish what your power requirements are.

Hope this helps.

Harm Millaard

[Blast1]

[solagratia77] “So I was worrying what if …by adding another
HDD would make my system unstable.”

Hard Drives average about 2.5w @ 5v and 6watts at 12v, if this was to make your system unstable you are in trouble already, as you are on the edge, and any variation in the power supply’s output as it ages would casuse problems, also a decent 500w supply is better than a poorly constructed 600w

[Solagratia77]

Thank you Harm & Blast1

I have decide not to worry too much about the power
and the stability issue.

I hope my Enermax Liberty 500AWT qualify
as a decent power supply unit.

Thanks again everybody !

-J
SolaGratia