Hard Drive Tip for the group

R

rpmnava

Active member
Hi Guys,

I thought I would share this with you guys. Totally by accident I found an affordable alternative for archiving and working on lager projects. Like most I figure in the cost of external drives for my projects. Its a bit of a pain hooking up power supplies etc.

So I then looked at Robo drives and other similar HDD solutions... alll around 800.00 by the time your done. Which is O.K. depending on your needs. I like the thought of hot-swapping drives as needed but Robo dosent offer this.

Enter Blac - X, an eSATA docking station for 3.5 SATA drives up to 1.5 T. I have a G5 PPC Quad. All I did was plug the Blac-X in the ESATA slot in the back of the computer and install an extra drive in the docking station, and whaLah!! Instant archival and scratch disc for projects.

The drives I use are 32 meg buffer / 7200. Plenty fast for DVDPROHD, PRORES, and some uncompressed HD stuff (2K limit on my stuff) .

Heres the part you have been waiting for.... your cost, $56.00 ! yup thats it! In the last few hours I have done limited testing with zero problems and find the speeds plenty fast. Attached are two screen shots of my Kona system test:

Also let it be known that this system does not support a raid of any kind. But for the money who cares. I now have hot swap-able storage for projects and content on the fly!

Heres the link:

HERE
 

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Your g5 has an ESATA port? it's so simple a contraption that i wonder if there are other makes out there for less $. It's a cheap backup solution.
 
Hard drives don't last forever. I now backup to hard drives as well but they eventually go down. I asked the folks at G-Technology and Lacie and they both told me that it is not good to archive to a drive and let it sit for a year. (like I wanted to do) Rather, they said it was good to excercise the drive at least once a month. Turn it on and spin it up, maybe copy a file to it, then shut it off. That way the oils do not build up and settle on the spindle and foul things up. Nothing is forever though. Not hardrives, tapes, DVDs. I just hope to backup my stuff and when I retire, I won't care about it any more..hehehhehe
 
Jokerswild said:
Rather, they said it was good to excercise the drive at least once a month. Turn it on and spin it up, maybe copy a file to it, then shut it off. That way the oils do not build up and settle on the spindle and foul things up.
Click to expand...


Sadly, this is exactly what led (I believe) to a recent SATA drive failure for me. I had an internal drive that I hadn't used in many months, then when I started using it again, it soon eventually failed.

I'm glad I know about this now.

.
 
i wouldnt suggest "working" off one of those as there is no cooling mechanism. but for archiving, it looks like an interesting approach...
 
yep, www.newegg.com has a bunch of these, actually about 10 bucks cheaper. as for the cooling...it's exposed to open air...not really sure how much more cooling you need unless it's 80 degrees in your studio...

I'm not an engineer though...
 
I've had no problems with the Thermal Take's Blac X cradle -- been using the version one without eSata for over a year (for archiving which then gets backed up to an SDLT tape drive). I just picked up the version with eSata from Newegg for a another workstation.

Now, I only wish there was a cradle to hold old IDE drives, there's only the adapter style IDE-USB adapters.
 
e-sata is way, WAY, CRAZY faster.

here is a case study. i have a new macpro 8 core with 16 gigs of ram. a certain 30 sec tv spot was taking 2:50 to render out to an external drive via its firewire800 port. i switched to the e-sata port and that render took 2:20 - thats a 30 second improvement. same drive just a different port.

and firewire 800 is way WAY faster than firewire 400.

so do the math there ; )
 
After some research, it seemed the FW one was really chincy, cheap plastic that kept breaking on people. The one I bought doesn't have FW, but does have eSATA. Now I just need a eSATA card for my G5. But for the time being I will use the USB2.
 
i live and die by caldigits e-sata 4-channel "fasta" card. LOVE IT! ive had them in my g5 dual, g5 quad and now have one in my macpro.
 
i have 3 mybooks , 2 of 500gig and 1 350gig...

i edit via fire wire with my mac book pro , and never had problem...

almost 1 year the first one.
 
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