Question for Ken Summerall

[Shane Ross]

I use bus powered firewire drives myself. But this is when I work of the MXF files directly, not the imported QT files.

LaCIE used to make one….not sure if they still do. I bought a bare 2.5″ drive then a separate enclosure.

OH…wait, I’m not Ken. Sorry.

Shane

GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
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[John Sutherland]

I will take any and all responses! Are you editing with these drives or just using them for file management? I would not use these as primary drives, but under certain circumstances it would be useful to have a bus powered drive fast enough to do edit with.

thanks,

John

John Sutherland
MDD G4 dual 1.25
1.12 gb ram
Atto UL3D
Huge 1.2TB Dual Max
FCP 4.5
CW 4.7
OSX 10.3.6/QT 6.2.5
Radeon 9000 w/2 17″ crt monitors

[Nate Stephens]

John,

I have found the “power” on buss powered drives to be dependent on what enclosure you have.. And even enclosures by the same manufacture are not going to give you the same performance..

I have many 2.5″ drives they are great for location work. I have recorded many hours of 1080DVCpro HD to them, but some of the drives (enclosures) can’t get enough power thru the firewire port. So they also have you plug in a USB to power plug adapter in the computers other USB port..

Take all the parts-n-plugs, test different drive enclosures and I always buy in pairs so I have a mirror drive and spare parts..

FCP, Mac Pro, Mac Book Pro, HPX500, HVX200, Betacam, Dvcam
Write for the Edit, Shoot for the Edit, Edit…..KISS Principle

[John Sutherland]

Thanks Nate,
What 2.5 enclosures are you “happiest” with?
John

[Rafael Amador]

Hi john,
I recently bought a couple of LaCie “Little Big Disk”. They come with e-SATA, USB-2 and FW.
When in FW mode can be bus powered. The disk are formated as “Raid 0” and spinning at 5.400 RPM.
Up to the AJA System Test, I get between 50/60 MB per second.
Rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Nate Stephens]

John,,

No recommends here, I was happy with a CP technologies Platinum series enclosure… Just perfect.

Small, fanless, and ran on buss power… The next CP Tech, I purchased was a little longer and needed the USB power adapter….. all they did was change a chip on the bridge board and they needed more power…

FCP, Mac Pro, Mac Book Pro, HPX500, HVX200, Betacam, Dvcam
Write for the Edit, Shoot for the Edit, Edit…..KISS Principle

[Ken Summerall]

John,

Sounds like you got several great responses. I wasn’t ignoring your post just gave my computer a little break over the holiday.

I use an enclosure from Other World Computing called the Mercury On-the-Go. It comes in several forms, mine is the FW400/800 and USB2. I do not use the USb connection, but the FW800 works just fine. I can get two DVCProHD 720/24p streams with no problem. If I add much more than that I have to render a little more. I should mention that the drive that I put in the enclosure is the old 7200 RPM dirve that came in my MBP. It is a 100gig and when I upgraded to a 200gig in my MBP I thought that it would be nice just to have a bus-powered drive to use as a back up, transfer, quickie edit drive. It works better than I expected so it gets a little more use than I thought it would.

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/on-the-go

K

[Shane Ross]

Not sure of the brand name of the enclosure I have. Got it from newegg.com or tigerdirect.com. It is the PHR-250CC. Love it.

Shane

GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def