A solid external drive for working with video?

I just bought a USB powered 160gb WD drive (mainly for use with DVRack) for $120 from Costco.

It weighs nothing (ounces) -- unbelievable
 
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All external HDs are cheap hard discs with rubber mounts and a logic board to conver it to USB/Firewire.

You can build them yourself for so much cheaper. Don't be fooled Lacie uses the same Hitachi/Seagate drives that you can buy at any computer part store (And the Hitachis were the IBM Deskstar drives that were Notorious for having high premature failure rates)

If it's an SATA drive it may include eSATA.

Your best bet is to buy a SATA hard disc, and a HD enclousure that fits your needs (USB/eSata/Firewire/800) and test it.

According to google, most drives fail within the first 3 months, or after 5 years. No brands were named in the study.

Once your drive is been tested and solid for three months, start dropping your important video files on the drive for an archive. Always have another backup at all times, oh and avoid DVD-Rs for anything longer than 18 month backups.
 
Abu Reno said:
All I can tell you is.... stay away from LaCie Drives. I own 4 and 3 are currently dead :(
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Lacie use to use Hitachi drives, but now I think they've switched to Seagate just because of the failure rates.

But remember, all seagate drives come with a 5 year warrenty. So if you build your own you can always send it back up to 5 years later to get a new one if it breaks, minus the $5-$7 shipping on your part.

There is nothing good about buying a retail external drive except for the convenience of having it _right now_.
 
I'm using two Maxtor's at the moment - a 300gb and 750gb - no complaints. It should be noted that Maxtor is now owned by Seagate, so it's apples and oranges between the two at this point.
 
I got 10 grands worth of footage sitting on a LaCie drive that has given up the ghost, aparently the contoler cards on the LaCie suck big time due to the heat they produce. I will never ever buy LaCie again not ever, never had a 500gb hitachi drive go down on me and i got loads of them.
LaCie is just a name and nothing else. There products suck big time, Iam not the only one to say this just look it up under google.
 
I have a Glyph GT050Q and the things a beast. I haven't had so much as a hiccup out of the thing. VERY pleased w/mines. : )
 
I currently use an external WD hard drive. It's an 80gig (you can get bigger, it's just what I had) The hard drive itself is a WD Caviar with an 8mb buffer and 7200rpm with an 11ms seek time I believe. It uses a USB 2.0 interface and for SD video from my DVX I've never had a problem, though I seriously doubt that it would hold up in an HD workflow. I've even used it as the scratch drive when doing tapeless workflows. No problems there either. I realize this post is a little late probably, but I thoguht i'd throw in my 2 cents. When I bought my Hard Drive it was 90$ at new egg, and I've seen recently the same spec hard drive, except in 250gig go for like 150$. Not a bad price IMHO.
 
i recently got a Seagate esata drive and esata pcmcia card for my dell laptop, I ran premiere pro 2.0, no probs at all, video clips loaded quick, no lock up, I'm very happy with it. I got it at new egg.
 
I tried Lacie, the customer service was real bad. I switched to G-Raid. It's great.
No problems, well almost. I did have a problem with it at first but that was my fault, I was hot plugging it. Toasted the Fire wire ports on it, BUT G-Raid was quick to replace it and the customer service is great.
For that reason, G-Raid has my vote. I use the 1 terabyte unit. Very compact, and looks great.
 
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