Need hardware advice please

[Ernie Santella]

Do a search on the topic. It’s been discussed many times in detail. Plus, you didn’t give any details of what you are doing and on what equipment?

HDV? SD? Uncompressed HD etc? Tower or Laptop? First off, FW800 is pretty limited for editing, especially with HD. Do some research into Fiber, eSATA etc. for faster Raid storage.

Ernie Santella
Santella Productions Inc.
http://www.santellaproductions.com

[Roli Rivelino]

Sorry I did try a search but couldn’t find a relevant post, I’m getting a;

Mac pro, single quad core 2.8ghz processor, 1x320gb 7200 hard drive 1x1TB 7200 hard drive Geforce 8800 512mb graphics card,

I will mainly be editing HD but will also be doing some DV

[Ernie Santella]

Still lots of questions. There are so many different types of ‘HD’. Formats like HDV are highly compressed all the way to Uncompressed 1080p which would require an extremely fast RAID.

Here’s a few links to read.
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/977568
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/1022850
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/1021735

Just use the search function and search ‘RAID’ ‘Storage’ etc. I found these links in minutes. Good Luck. We’ll all help, but it sounds like you don’t completely understand what the differences are yet.

Ernie Santella
Santella Productions Inc.
http://www.santellaproductions.com

[Alex Elkins]

Check out http://www.eclipsecomputers.com in Coventry, UK for some good prices and selection on harddrives.

I would recommend Seagate Barracuda or Hitachi Ultrastar drives. Both of these drives come as ‘stand-alone’, i.e. not inside an external enclosure.
You can get Seagate and Western Digital FW800 pre-built external drives, but personally I would buy a SATA harddrive and an e-SATA enclosure and just make it myself. It’s straight-forward, and SATA is much faster than FW800. You’d also need an e-SATA PCI card, which are about £15 for a bog-standard one (what I use on my G5 at home). Works fine and anyone in a computer shop would be able to help if you weren’t sure about it.

Good luck,
Alex

[Roli Rivelino]

OK thanks Alex, I’ve found the Seagate 1000Gb FreeAgent Pro External eSATA,USB,FW Drive at the site you gave me.

I’m still a bit in the dark about this eSATA business, I’m just wondering if this is the right hard drive to go for and if I’ll still need an eSATA card with it?

This is the product link to the drive if you need to check https://www.eclipsecomputers.com/product.aspx?code=HES-1000FPEUF

Many thanks

[Alex Elkins]

Hi Roli,

That drive is pretty good, we use them in our office. You don’t need any additional cards to use it, as your computer has Firewire built in – however, for an extra £15 I’d personally be wanting to get the e-SATA card too, because it’ll be a hell of a lot faster than FW400. Note that is is FW400, not FW800 which is what you said you wanted in your first post. (Don’t forget to buy an e-SATA to e-SATA cable too if you go for the card, as I don’t think they come with the harddrive.)

Good luck,
Alex

[Roli Rivelino]

Once again, thanks Alex, I’m getting the Lacie pc card and I’ll make sure to get the cable as well.