Slightly OT: portable hard drive with no moving parts

[Jeff Carpenter]

Well, all hard drives have moving parts. They spin in circles…7,200 times per minute.

But that aside, they can get the job done. Pretty much any firewire hard drive will do the trick. They will require their own power source, but if you’re using an iMac I assume you’ll be near an electrical outlet.

Firewire drives are reasonably safe, but you should only use them for media that is still on tape and can be re-captured. So any graphics, audio files, or Final Cut project files can be transferred home on the drive but should be copied off of it to the iMac when you get home.

In the last 4 years I’ve only had 1 of my 5 firewire drives fail 1 time…that’s a very good percentage, but it’s not perefct. As long as you follow that rule any hard drive failure means you’ll just have to re-capture footage and not re-do work.

[David Roth weiss]

Bob,

They all have internal moving parts. Perhaps your best bet is something like the Lacie “All Terrain” mobile hard drives, which you can see at https://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10722

DRW

[Bob Roberts]

Bummer, I thought stuff like the G-Drive Mini was all solid state…like an iPod or P2. I guess not.

[Ron James]

Only the small (2, 4 GB) iPods have flash drives. My iPod Video has a small hard drive. You can actually feel it whirring away at times.

God I love my iPod.

[Bret Williams]

So why not use an iPod? It doesn’t require it’s own power source which is nice.