Best bus powered external drive

Mathew Knight

Mathew Knight

Active member
Hi guys I know there is some excellent info here on external hard drives and I have read it and will follow the advice. But for feild shooting I am particularly keen on using external hard drives that are bus powered (then transferring to larger drives later). I have found that it is often quite convenient to transfer cards in the car. And seeing as the laptop doesn't need external power i don't want the drive being the weak link in the power chain.

Ideally I want something that is about 200 to 500 GB but there seems to be very few bus powered drives that are larger than 200GB and have firewire 800 & 400. I have found USB 2.0 drives to be quite slow.

the only one I can find that seems perfect is the LaCie little big disk (320GB). But this is of couse a LaCie and their reputation is very bad. But if anyone has used this particular drive a lot I am keen to hear their experience.

So anyone know of any other nice reliable external hard drives that are bus powered, over 200GB's, have firewire 400, 800 & USB ?
 
To fill up a 200 Gb drive that would mean offloading about 25 eight gig cards or over 3 hours of footage at 1080, or 7.5 hours at 720/24pn. I think your mac battery would die before you could do that many off loads. That being said G-Technologies is coming out with a new G-Raid mini up to 320gb that is FW bus powered. It ain't cheap though.
http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-RAID-mini.cfm

Also there is this one from acomdata that is FW bus powered but it is only up to 100gb, which I usually find is enough for a days shooting.
http://acomdata.com/hdp/fs.html
 
An option I chose was OWC (Other World Computing) and their 100GB 7200rpm Bus powered drive. It is small and comes with everything you need (AC power). You can almost buy two for the price of the G-tech. The actual drive is a Hitachi and it has been great for me in the field. They have MANY configuration options on this drive. Check it out.
Cheers, Ray
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MOFWU100GB72/
 
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