OT. Best Bang for the buck External Drive

[John Rofrano]

You might consider getting a trayless drive cage like this one. It will allow you to buy internal SATA drives and hot swap them. This will give you unlimited space with the speed of an internal drive. I use one similar this.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Mike Hinkel]

I could use this outside the box, John. I like this idea, Thanks. Now to find a decent SATA drive.

[John Rofrano]

[Mike Hinkel] “I could use this outside the box,”

No. It requires power and SATA connections from inside your case. If you want an external box then you might want to add on an enclosure like the CineRAID. It has eSATA and USB 3.0 and it’s what I use connected via eSATA to my tower.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Mike Hinkel]

Thanks John. I have to see just what I can do. There is not much room in my now seemingly ancient box. I do have a vertical bay that was for an HP personal storage drive. The other DVD bay is full of wires from the upgraded power supply when I put the new video card and the first Sata drive in.

[John Rofrano]

If you don’t have much room in your current case, then eSATA is a great choice because you get the same speed as an internal drive with the flexibility of it being external. Here is a single drive enclosure that support eSATA and USB 3.0 (backward compatible with USB 2.0) so this might be a good choice for you:

NexStar 3 SuperSpeed

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Mike Hinkel]

That looks like the way to go, John. Thanks. The next thing would be to find a good drive for it.

[John Rofrano]

[Mike Hinkel] “The next thing would be to find a good drive for it.”

That’s more of a personal choice. I’m a big fan of Western Digital and I always buy WD Black for my internal editing drives and WD RED for my RAID drives.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Mike Hinkel]

What would I need for the enclosure you suggest, John? Is that considered a raid?

[Stephen Mann]

I use an external USB-2 docking station and bare drives. Each project gets a drive of it’s own, and with 1Tb drives going for $50 at NewEgg, I pretty much have unlimited storage.

Here’s a batch file I wrote to make any drive look also like Drive B:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1421565/Make_Drive_B.bat

Run this from the external drive and no matter what drive letter Windows assigned to it, it will also be Drive B:.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Mike Hinkel]

Thanks Steve. That looks simple enough. How/where would I apply the batch file to work like your setup?