Best external drives on a budget?

E

eddie l

New member
Hello all, great forum - I've been cruising around for the last few days getting ready for my first project with the HVX and have gotten all sorts of valuable info from your posts.

I've got one question I hope you can help with. I'm shooting a short narrative film (~10 min) on HD and trying to figure the best external hard drives to get on a relatively small budget. I'm hoping to get two 250GB drives (one to work from, one backup) and would like to pay less than $400. They would have to work cross platform ideally, as I'm using my laptop (PC) in the field and editing on my school's Mac. Advice?

Workflow (I think, will this work?):
HVX200
Three 4 gig P2's
Dell laptop w/Express Card slot
FW 800 to two 250GB External Drives
Editing on Mac with FCP
 
Go to Newegg.com they have great drives you will can get almost any drive you want for less then $400.00 what you want to make sure is that the Harddrive is a Seagate I use a ton of external drive you can get a 1 tb external raid with FW 800 and usb and FW 400 for that price or for around $250.00 you can get a 640 gb external raid at newegg with all the connection mentioned just do a search I have the 640 GB and it works great very fast with FW800. I wlll post a link

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822186043
 
Budget eh...

I know a lot of people use the G-Raid series. I'm looking into the higher end CalDigit devices. The distance from my studio to my editing bay is two flights of stairs so I'm thinking that the removable drive aspect of CalDigit is really beneficial for setup and what not.

Do you already have the three 4 gig P2 cards? You might be better to get two 8 gig in my opinion. Or cut a 4 gig P2 card (you only need 2 for the continuous workflow) and use the extra money to buy the HD.

Look into G-Tech and I believe LaCie and Western Digital have some high end drives in your price range as well...
 
La Cie's have been very good to me, but I hear differign opinions on them.
I refuse to touch another MyBook, lost 2 cards of data on one as it crashed and burned within a week of purchase.
 
here's some advice... never use Maxtor. I lost 5 years of photos thanks to them and I'm too poor to use a drive recovery company
 
Thanks for the help so far.
Still wondering about the cross platform compatibility issue - I've been doing a bit of research on file systems and it seems like I'll be fine as long as the drive is formated for FAT32. Is that right? Do all hard drives support this kind of formating? Are there disadvantages to this?
 
yes... u can use an external drive with either a mac or a PC. I mean how come it's so easy to "switch" to a mac? Because the drives are comparable and Apples are just so gorgeous anyway.
 
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