rugged firewire for in the field

[Jeremy Garchow]

Raw drives with loads of foam strapped around them.

🙂

[Tom Brooks]

I have some questionable units also (a common brand that shall remain unnamed for now).

The CalDigit FireWireVR line looks good, but we haven’t bought any yet. They have a lot of the right words in their product descriptions. Are you OK with AC Power on these units? CalDigit seem to be very eager to get new customers. I’d try to feel out their technical support system.

My new criteria for P2 transfer drives will be modular construction (so that drives, fans and even circuit boards can be easily replaced), good fans and cooling design, hardware RAID-1, swappable drives, smallest size and weight, ruggedness–in no particular order. Wiebetech’s trayless designs might fill the bill too. Let us know what you find.

[Jeremy Garchow]

I am not kidding. I have a cheapo enclosure from firmtek that I have traveled with, dropeed, unplugged, spilled on, battered, bruised or otherwise, and it keeps going with no data loss going on three or so years now.

Knocking on wood.

[David Roth weiss]

Aaron,

When you buy ready-built firewire drives such as LaCie or G-Tech you never know what hard drives they’re putting in their enclosures. Trust me, neither company goes out of their way to use anything but consumer grade drives in their retail firewire enclosures — these are drives made for your granny to check her email, they’re not for the professional power user who takes them on the road.

Sure, ready-built firwaire drives are convenient, but you can do a lot better yourself. However, you really need to move to SATA, which means buying yourself an express card and an enclosure such as Firmtek, which Jeremy also recommends. Firmtech enclosures are very well built, have fewer parts, and drives plug directly into the backplane, meaning no inetrnal cables and such. The HITACHI Deskstar E7K500 is an excellent bare drive to consider putting inside, as it is an “enterprise” level drive, with a mean time between failure (MTBF) rate of 1.2 million hours. The enterprise level drives are for mission critical applications and normally have added shock protection. SATA drives are also much faster than even firewire 800, so you have that added benefit too.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Aaron Neitz]

Thanks for the info on Firmtek. We’ll definitely look into them. Enterprise drives are certainly much better.

I hate to knock G-Tech. We’ve got a couple of their G-Speeds which are workhorses… and until recently we’ve had ZERO problems with their firewire… but then again, those never spent 4 months in the chilean bush.

Nevertheless, we made multiple backups so no data is really lost

[Jeremy Garchow]

If your drives are clicking, that means the internal drive parts are wonked.

I will recommend another dirve just for it’s sheer portability. It’s small, light, fast enough for ProResHQ HD adn rewuires no external power. The only major downside is capacity, but you cannot beat this form factor. I have tested it, but not battle tested it, so take it for what it’s worth.

https://www.sonnettech.com/product/fusionf2.html

Jeremy

[David Roth weiss]

[Aaron Neitz] “Enterprise drives are certainly much better.”

Check out th ereview of the new Seagate 1TB drives. https://www.storagereview.com/1000.sr

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Arnie Schlissel]

A general rule of thumb…

Most, if not all external FW & USB drives come with a 1 year warranty, regardless of what’s inside. OTOH, you can easily buy yourself a bare Hitachi, Seagate, WD or Samsung drive with a 3 or 5 year warranty & stick it in a FW enclosure for around the same price per GB. For a little bit more, you can buy an enterprise class drive from Hitachi or Seagate with a 5 year warranty.

Arnie
Now in post: Peristroika, a film by Slava Tsukerman
https://www.arniepix.com/blog