Creating the perfect offloading pc laptop

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dukethunder

New member
I'm moving this post from elsewhere on the HVX200/HPX170 forum

I need a laptop that is optimized for dumping video data off of cards onto hard drives. I work with all of the cameras, so I need a computer that will work with P2 cards, SxS, CF and SD. My typical workflow is to dump the cards through my MacBookPro onto 2 external hard drives, usually via FW800. But w/ Apple's continued insistence on not including an ExpressCard slot on the smaller MBP's (and with my general fatigue from wrestling w/ my duel adaptors), I'm ready to go to a PC laptop. Having never used a PC before, I'm not sure what is possible, but my dream machine would have both a PCMCIA slot and an ExpressCard slot. It would also have FW800 and USB 3.0. And in my dream world, it would also have 2 e-sata plugs. The PC laptop would be used exclusively for offloading cards. Is a machine like this possible? Does anybody have any other suggestions on what would make a better offloading machine? My priorities are a device that offloads as fast as possible and as reliably as possible. Being smaller and lighter would also be good b/c I travel a lot.

Thanks!
 
I'm not positive about this but I think you'd have to custom build that system yourself.
 
@OP.

I have a dual-drive MacBook Pro 15" 2,1 , and a hackintosh to do exactly this. I replaced my Optical Drive slot in the MBP with a 500GB SATA Hitachi 2.5" drive and a secondary SATA tray from iFixit for $50.00 - total in-laptop storage capacity is 1TB - dual location sans the FCP/OS/P2CMS applications.

Tethered fire-wire used for Scopes and framing previews, not for attaching G-RAID enclosures.
Optional TEMPO E-SATA Card, provides eSATA speed offloads to the directors G-TECH drives,
for both P2 card images and for SD or HD sound files second system sound files. (this is done at end of day).

With that said, DELL, HP, DELL (Alienware) and ACER make what is known as a "Desktop Replacement" laptop, however it has a 17" screen most of the time, and does support dual drive, and RAID-1 setups, ExpressCard 34 with a cheaper and better PCMCIA flipper. But why go crazy, the iops on it arent going to be any faster than N over X. So just use a used piece of technology and tune it to your needs, no fear in opening it... it's old.

P.S. There is no "Perfect" solution, each uses what works for them in long and short-term, on set and in post.

P.P.S. Next revision of this loader will boot OS-X/Apps from a 64GB USB drive, while allowing clear access to both SATA DISKS.

Why not RAID-1 the two SATA 500 drives you ask, well it won't help on writes, and they are synchronous, and won't protect from accidental file deletion.
Also, FCP is there so that full screen reviews of certain shots can be done for the director next day, or from a day that we're shooting to match,
esp. if we don't have continuity stills etc... (on a multi day production.) - Also it allows me to go to Starbucks and send ENG interviews to editorial right from the location, if it's time sensitive for any reason.

Soon 1TB SSD will be cheap enough to do so your MBP can have 2TB or 1TB redundant storage, if you're going the PC route, you will end up doing the same thing. But the OS is less than agreeable, NTFS Explorer copy fails sometimes, and PC's arent as nice about Firewire/USB volumes not being "ejected" nicely - If I were you I'd opt to look at Darwin, OpenSolaris or Linux as base OS with filesystem journaling in case of powerloss. Notebooks on internal drives are also perfect, since they have a battery to prevent from catastrophic powerloss crash, while tethered firewire drives don't have any battery backup at all, most that offer raid, do so with an NVRAM protect write-cache, which also fails in a power-outage.

Just don't forget that the legacy MacBook Pro you have is no longer a multi-purpose laptop, and that nightly you need to dump it's contents out to a more robust storage.

The only question is, do you care about Snow Leopard, or do you care to have a loader machine that functions on and off set.

Plus the new 17" MBP still has Express34, and its screen res will allow full-frame review of 1920x1080 footage, not 1366x768 nor 1440x900.

Once I get Snow, I'll let you know if you can backdate the PCMCIA.kext 10.5.8 into /System/Library/Extentions and have it operate.

Copy speed via Express34 DUEL is about 1/2 that of the the footage shot, so each 17min 16GB card (I have 8x16GB) takes about 8 minutes to two target drives.
Loader laptop is cleaned out prior to every shoot, sometimes the screenplay in PDF, production artwork, stills and other are loaded pertinent to the project, including calsheets, contact lists and other important info.

Single box, one powersupply, 2x batteries, 1x duel, 1x temp e-sata + 2x sata cables, 1x firewire to mini firewire, 1x usb 2 mini usb, SD card reader, CF card reader.

Only complaint, thing makes considerable noise - so cannot be located right on the set (tight interiors only) and be powered on at the same time.
 
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