Anyone using Wiebetech SATA dock?

B

Brian_Broz

Active member
Hi,
I am going to trade my G5 to for a 17" MacBook Pro.
Hard drive options are expensive for a laptop (especially bus powered) but I came across the Wiebetech SATA dock: http://www.wiebetech.com/products/satadock.php
This allows you to use a 3.5" SATA drive and bus power it from FW800 on a laptop. Might be great for offloading P2 cards in the field...especially if you are giving a backup drive to the director...and keeping a copy for yourself.
Has anyone used this unit? I am wondering if there are any speed bottlenecks or issues with DVCPROHD editing.
Thanks for any comments,

Brian Broz
 
I just bought the non-bus powered version of the SATA dock and use it for formatting drives, disk recovery, etc.

The main thing to remember is that this is only a dock and does not include an enclosure. Handling bare drives can be very tricky, and I definitely would not want to do this in the field. The other thing to remember is that not all 3.5" SATA drives can be bus powered. Check out this review http://barefeats.com/hard74.html It's focus is on the LaCie bus-powered notebook RAID, but compares it to the bus-powered Wiebetech UltraGB+.

Your best bet may be just to buy some FW800 bus-powered notebook non-RAID 2.5" IDE enclosures (what a mouthful!) and add your own drives. Check out http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MOTG800U2/ I haven't use this, but if you use a 7200 rpm drive the performance should be acceptable.

If you plan to capture DVCPRO HD directly from an HVX to FCP, then you will probably want to add an FW800 expresscard as well.
 
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I recently talked to the guys at Granite Digital about SATA vs FW 800 and using SATA drives with FW 800. Firewire is a bottleneck if you are going to be using SATA hard drives in your setup. You would get the best performance using a SATA enclosure with SATA hard drives in them, but there is no way to connect that to a MacBook Pro or iMac. Your best bet right now, as morias said, is to go with a 7200 RPM hard drive setup with a firewire 400 or 800 enclosure. I would recommend the setup I have in this other DVXuser thread:

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=60768&highlight=macbook

Ted
 
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