hard drive/start-up questions re: CCmag’s jerry hofman article

[Ed Dooley]

1)Hitachi, Seagate, and the higher end Maxtors are all good.
1a) Would work fine, but remember when using some apps, like Photoshop, you need a big swap-file or cache buffer.
1b) Yes
2)The only benefit would be if you wanted to have 2 SATA internal drives as your media drives and you didn’t want
to add another internal drive for booting from. Using the FW drive for booting would allow you to stripe the 2 internal drives.
2a)Yep, that would work, but why not go with a bigger drive, not much more $ and it will accomodate more files for moving around
2b)Go with a 7,200 RPM drive
I used a FW drive for booting in a G4 MDD. I put 4 drives in the box, striped, and it worked great for years (still works fine actually)
Ed

[WaterBoy] “editing wise, there’s nothing more attractive than a rock solid FCP system, especially when the guy behind you is editing on an AVID and it’s crashing all the time.

so here’s my questions:

1.) what’s the best brand of internal SATA drive to use as my FCP start-up drive?
1a.) would a smaller drive work OK? it should, but is there a benefit of having extra space?
1b.) can/should i run all of FCS (FCP,Motion,DVDSP) on this separate start-up disk?

2.) is there a benefit of using a FireWire drive as a start-up disk?
2a.) if so, would a small portable 80g work OK? my thinking is i could take FCP/FCS with me and use clients machines when necessary.
2b.) smaller FW drives tend to run at the 5400rpms. is this OK or is 7200rpms required?

i’m sure most of this is “master of the obvious” questions, but i’d rather not go down a road of time & $$$ that i cannot afford.”

[Zander]

i supose ill add onto the question as ive been pondering this, is it also ok to have say, fcp (and some of the studio like dvd studio pro) after effects, word (for typing titles and what not), and some other adobe programs like photoshop, illustrator and such and than safari for any internet action going on?

i was curius about what is ok to have on these drives and what wasn’t,becuase they are all programs i would like to go back and forth between when editing

Aaron Zander-Student editor
If it’s out there and it does somethign to something,
teach me how to use it
Powerbook g4 1.5 GHz (it might not be big, but i can take it on set
fcp 5, ae 6.5pro adobe cs2

[Ed Dooley]

It’s fine (and highly recommended) to have all your apps on drives other than your media drives.
Put all apps on the boot drive and all video/audio files on the media drives.
Ed

[Zander]

well yes, have a scratch/media drive, and then an app drive, but what i took from that article, was that we needed 2 bootdrives 1 for all your normal every day stuff like homework and fun and one for edditing, was i wrong?

Aaron Zander-Student editor
If it’s out there and it does somethign to something,
teach me how to use it
Powerbook g4 1.5 GHz (it might not be big, but i can take it on set
fcp 5, ae 6.5pro adobe cs2