Bus Powered Drives

F

f5freddyj

Active member
Did a brief search already, but I'm wondering how people feel about bus powered drives as a field offloading storage solution for my powerbook.

I've had good look with g tech.
Now I'm looking at OWC's Mercury line of drives.

Anyone use the mercury drives?
Triple interfaces?

Does teh 5400 vs 7200 really matter?

fj
 
FJ,

I love the Mercury bus-powered drives. What I like most is that the enclosures are easy to swap drives in and out of. In the past, what I've done is taken a handful of the cheaper drives (100GB or so) with me on a shoot. Once i fill one, I pop it out, seal it up and pack it securely, then FedEx it back to the studio, where my assistant (wife) backs up the footage to a larger storage system (RAID'ed Firmtek eSATA enclosure). Doing it this way means I've got the original files on the original drives, as well as mirrored backups. And if (as can happen) a drive fails, I don't lose everything.

Oh, and I price the cost of the drives into the estimate for each job.

--SM
 
FWIW, I've been using a USB-powered WD Passport drive for a year now. No hiccups. It's not very fast, but for the price, it's a good extra 80GB of storage when it's hard to find power.
 
If I'm not mistaken wd makes a 160 now.

Might give that a look as well.

thnx for the feedback... keep it coming.

fj
 
Well, I would also look at it this way…

If you've got 64GB of P2 storage, an 80GB drive ($60 or so) would allow offloading of all your data. Put too much of your data on one big drive, and you run the risk of losing all of it. Trust me, it happens. I hate having a bunch of drives sitting around, but after a certain amount of time (nine months, usually), I send the original footage and of the elements to the client anyway.

--SM
 
The Mercury On-the-go (clear case) drives are great, and reliable. I've had some issues with the slimmer, opaque-case mercuries.

I use the fw400 drives (I have 4)... haven't used the triple interface.

7200 indeed are a little faster than 5400, but I've used both successfully for live capture of DVCProHD with FCP.
 
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