External Drives

[muroshi]

What are the best deals for extarnal drives out there and do I need Fireware or is USB 2.0 enough? I like to cut video.

 

[niknak]

G Raid firewire 800 drives fast and reliable, nuff said.
Don't cut video too much, it bleeds heavily.rogar-Happy(DBG):

 

[VaricamLife]

"Best Deal" would be to buy your own external casing and then look around for the best sales on good hard drives and build it all yourself. But if you want to do a raid setup and are not confident with that, it might be wiser to just go fully pre-built. The mentioned G-Raids are a good solution. There are others around too, I just can't recall the names.

If you have a set budget in mind, you could try asking around here with that. People might be able to then be more specific. Otherwise we assume you're willing to spend whatever to just get the "right" stuff (but sometimes you can get away with alternatives just fine, even if not optimal persay).

USB 2.0 is not good enough for cutting with. While the marketing numbers seem to imply it is at par with FW400, the nature of the interface works quite differently. The prices you seen online for them make them oh so tempting, but they are good for storage and backup, not editing.

cheers.

 

[Splinky]

Could you use two drives for your scratch disc? I just picked up a Seagate 400GB GB drive. I would like to use this as my primary scratch disc. My old drive is a Fantom 120GB. Is there anyway to use the Fantom drive as a back up? I know I can just drag and copy the files over to the drive. But is there a way for one drive to mirror the other?

 

[giacomino]

I am looking into buying a 500gig external drive for a new imac. Has anyone used this external drive? It is a Mercury Elite-AL Pro FW800/400+USB2 Performance 7200RPM RAID http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/USB/EliteAL/PerformanceRAID


This is cheaper then the G-Raid and looks like it is the same just a 3rd party. The drive is from the OWC website where some dvxuser's buy their memory.

Thanks, Jimmy

 

[niknak]

Do you want to trust your time and footage with a "cheap" drive? should be more the question.

 

[filmismymedium]

Could you use two drives for your scratch disc? I just picked up a Seagate 400GB GB drive. I would like to use this as my primary scratch disc. My old drive is a Fantom 120GB. Is there anyway to use the Fantom drive as a back up? I know I can just drag and copy the files over to the drive. But is there a way for one drive to mirror the other?

You can set up a raid mirrored set (RAID1 I believe) through disk utility. However it will only allow your mirrored set to be the size of the smallest drive. So your 400 + 120GB combo would result in a total of 120GB.