Advice on Buying External Firewire Drives

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cmp

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WHICH BRAND EXTERNAL FIREWIRE DRIVE?

I'm getting ready to purchase two 500 GB external firewire drives for editing a documentary project using FCP 5. I actually plan to hire an editor, but in the meantime I want to save time and money by capturing, logging, and organizing my footage. I have a Powerbook G4 laptop that is a little outdated (FW 400 but I have one of those hubs that I can plug the drives and deck into) -- but right now I do not have the funds to upgrade.

Apparently ALL external drives have the possibility of "crashing" and it's obviously important to organize material clearly and consistently, but are there any suggestions out there about WHICH BRAND to buy?

I have a Lacie 250 but one employee at the Apple Store waved some red flags in my face this afternoon about purchasing Lacie drives. He mentioned G-drives, and I have also read about CalDigit on Creative Cow. Not sure if there are big differences in price, but wondering what people here have experienced or suggest.

Thank you!
 
I have older G-Raids, and they are great. HOWEVER, the newer G-Raid 2 drives have new technology in them...and with that an issue. If you daisy chain them, the performance drops dramatically. From 80 MB/s to 16MB/s. Alone, they are fine, together...bad.

I highly recommend the CalDigit Firewire VR. But, I am from the Cow, so...

I just wanted to mention the G-Raid thingy.
 
Thank you Shane.

I went to the g-technology website and was a little overwhelmed with the choices. As I only have one firewire port on my current laptop, I suggested to one of the guys I spoke to at the Apple Store today that I might daisychain the two 500GB drives, but he mentioned the same problem with performance being slowed down. I have two free ports on that FW hub I have, and he said that if I plug each of them directly into the hub, the performance speed should be maintained.

I will also look into the CalDigit Firewire VR. Another website that made me feel like I needed a translation tool, but between this and my recent posts inquiring about 23.98 timeline vs. 29.97 timeline (still trying to figure that one out, seemingly contradictory info but i'm sorting through it), I'm learning a tremendous amount here on DVX user and on the Moo site.

thank you for your advice.
 
I've used a lot of Lacie drives with no problems. I've used Other World Computing, love them. I've used G-Tech, love them.
 
My personal holy grail in this department is one without an external power supply. I have to travel with drives all of the time and not having bricks to drag around makes a world of difference. One less thing to forget, one less think to lose, one less thing to carry. The only one that I have found that does this is the Hard Box. However, the FW800 ports have been known to be flakey.

http://tinyurl.com/fpz97

Anyone else have recs?
 
with lacie, make sure it is formatted for mac os.
at present i have four of them.
three of them came factory formatted mac os,
one of them (grrrrrrr....) was formatted for both mac and pc (fat32)...
i used it for a year and then one day
100 plus gigs of vid vaporized,
the lacie techs said it was because the pc/mac formatting isn't as stable.
so if you go lacie
check/ reformat before you capture.
 
any experience with glyph drives?

any experience with glyph drives?

Anyone have experience with glyph drives?

I was just at Tekserve in New York, and someone there added their two cents about Glyph drives, which are a little more expensive than the G-drives but offer an additional year of warranty (3 years), which judging from a lot of posts that I've read about external drive issues might not be a bad thing! She also praised their customer service and said they have excellent cooling abilities, portability, etc.

I just purchased a PCMCIA FW 800 card for my laptop, so now I have one FW400 port (for my deck, I think), and two FW800 ports (for the drives, I think).
 
Peter_Nigrini said:
I have to travel with drives all of the time and not having bricks...
Click to expand...

I have a Firewire self powered drive. Comes with AC if you need it. I got it for my 17" Powerbook. Not enough power in the USB port to power a OTG drive. This one works great. I don't use it for live capture, but I have used it for copying P2 data from cards and the FS.

It's 160 Gigs, Other World Computing, I love it with a laptop.
 
Dudes, a Glyph drive is the best drive investment you can make. I have four different Glyph FW drives which have been in daily use, dragged to locations, for 3-6 years, with never the slightest hiccup. In that same time period, I've had problems and failures with more than 20 other drives. LaCies are very failure prone. G-drives can be finicky about the particular port they're plugged into, and have sometimes done some pretty weird things.

Glyphs are designed for audio professionals to be fast, quiet, reliable, and compatible. Their firmware is optimized for A/V production. And Glyph doesn't offer a longer warranty than everyone else - they offer a longer and much better warranty, which includes FREE OVERNIGHT REPLACEMENT and FREE DATA RECOVERY. If the drives weren't as rock-solid as they are, this would be disastrous... notice that noone else makes this kind of guarantee...

So, get a Glyph... you won't be sorry! http://www.glyphtech.com

-Barry

P.S., Peter Nigrini - the Glyph's don't have power blocks...
 
that (above) is amazing!
freedata recovery?
when i called around about my 100 plus gigs of unaccessable footage
(due to lacie corrupted directory)
all i was offered
was 10% off the 700 to 1400 $ the recovery company lacie refered me to
wanted me to pay!!!
i will check out glyph next time the brain needs more long term memory.
 
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Keep in mind with the "free" recovery from Glyph...the "free" recovery only includes them using software based methods to restore your data...not hardware methods...they are not a full-blown data recovery house that has a clean room in which they can remove platters, etc.

It is still the best offer that I have ever seen, but it is very important to clarify that their recovery attempt is not nearly as thorough as those offerered by data recovery houses (which, admittedly, can be easily $1000 to $1500).

-shannon
 
I've never had to use their Data Recovery offer, but from what interactions I've had with them, I'd say that their data recovery efforts would fall somewhere between softyware-only and clean-room approaches... certainly more than one could do with any off-the-shelf software. They certainly would work with extensive knowledge of the drive firmware (and perhaps specialized firmware) and swap out whatever components they are responsible for. They know drives inside and out...
 
Hey Ullanta, I have seen about 30 messages posted about the Glyph drives...I think 29 are from you. : )

1 - Why do you like them more than G-tech?
2- Why doesn't anyone else buy them or talk about them?

Thx.
 
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