External hard disk

R

Realdvxuser

Well-known member
At the moment I am looking for an extra hard disk for back-ups. It should also function as the drive to edit from on a laptop so I can work from it on the desktop later on as well (without having to copy).

Does anybody have any suggestions as to what I should look for? It should be fast enough to use straight in the NLE, so I think it HAS to be one with firewire, correct?

Cheers!

--_--__

yohenk
 
New USB 2.0 drives work also -> are fast enough, but some people have had problems with older USB drivers (and electronics), which drop the bus speed to USB1 level if usb mouse or keyboard are touched.

If you have a new laptop USB2 should work, but Firewire works "always", so it is a better bet. At least try a USB combination out before shoveling the cash.
 
It shouldn't be a problem, but make sure the drive you get is at least a 7200rpm drive or it could cause you problems and it won't be fast enough to capture to without dropping frames.
LaCie makes great, rugged drives though they can be a bit heavy. I would also recommend going with firewire.
 
RoamingBobert said:
It shouldn't be a problem, but make sure the drive you get is at least a 7200rpm drive or it could cause you problems and it won't be fast enough to capture to without dropping frames.
LaCie makes great, rugged drives though they can be a bit heavy. I would also recommend going with firewire.
Click to expand...

I agree w/ Robert, except for the Lacie part. After my Lacie harddrive died last year I did extensive google searches to try to trouble shoot it and found the drives incredibly prone to failure, and people were posting about similar failures all over the place. I would recommend OWC (other world computing www.macsales.com ). they are great. phone sales folks are incredibly patient, helpful, and knowledgeable. have bought many things from them... my other stand-by, for things like extra RAM, is crucial.com .

good luck...
 
I bought a Western Digital 160gig harddrive(both usb2.0/firewire) for 140$ from newegg.com around 5 months ago and it works great, I'm about to buy another bigger one, I think it's a 240gig.
 
I have 2 terrarbytes (4 lacie 500gigs) and they're external. Firewired all the way and for the last year, or close to, they've never given a problem.

Not sure what's up with that.
 
I actually highly recomend Lacie drives. They are cheap, fast and are the only hard drives that actually look good. I use them exclusively and have never had a problem. And I have heard very few people complaining about them dying but i suppose every brand has its failures. Hope that helps
 
It looks like I'll be going with a new G5 and a couple of power books and shooting to hard drives. After looking this thread over I was wondering if any of you have any experience with these two hard drives. I picked two drives with the same capacity and speed for a comparison, but I would really like bigger drives.

From MacMall they have the Fantom Drives Titanium Series' fan free aluminum casing provides durability and silent operation. Featuring a sleek aluminum design and a 250gb capacity 7200RPM hard drive One year warranty $139.99 http://www.macmall.com/macmall/shop/detail~dpno~247894.asp

From Other World Computing they have these. 250GB OWC Mercury Elite-AL 800 Pro 7200RPM FireWire 800/400 Oxford 912 Storage Solution with 8MB Data Buffer. Includes all cables, Dantz Retrospect Express and Intech Speed Tools! 2yr Warranty. (OWCMA8FW7250GB8) $209.99 http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/USB/EliteAL/800/

David
 
maybe it's unfair to come back into this thread simpy saying the same thing as before, BUT: i have 3 owc drives now (i also have 3 lacies, one of which is dead, and is totally a probblem w/ lacie's internal architecture, b/c i was able to pull the drive itself out, salvage the data in two steps by mounting it both in a mac tower and an external enclosure---) anyway, 3 owc's: 1 is 500gb raid, another is 600gb raid, both of those are the mercury elite-AL, and the other is a 100gb on-the-go "pocket drive". they include a bunch of shareware and high quality cables, and am about to buy another mercury elite AL enclosure for the 200gb western digital drive that was in the fried lacie enclosure. that said, the main reason for this post was to sound a warning in regards to macs and firewire support. there had been a lot of rumors recently about apple phasing out firewire support (sounds ridiculous, right?) but the latest generation of ipods are usb only (admittedly, consumer products and aspiring always to be more and more cross platform) but the new intel-chip powerbook-replacements, the macbook pro, has no fw 800 port, one fw 400 and two usb 2.0. of course you can buy a pci card that has a fw800 port or two, but just food for thought, i have no real advice there, i'm still going to go fw, but is good to have options... and, nice thing about the owc drives, is that you can have all three, fw 400 / 800 / usb2.0, conections for the drive...
 
michael33 said:
maybe it's unfair to come back into this thread simpy saying the same thing as before, BUT: i have 3 owc drives now (i also have 3 lacies, one of which is dead, and is totally a probblem w/ lacie's internal architecture, b/c i was able to pull the drive itself out, salvage the data in two steps by mounting it both in a mac tower and an external enclosure---) anyway, 3 owc's: 1 is 500gb raid, another is 600gb raid, both of those are the mercury elite-AL, and the other is a 100gb on-the-go "pocket drive". they include a bunch of shareware and high quality cables, and am about to buy another mercury elite AL enclosure for the 200gb western digital drive that was in the fried lacie enclosure. that said, the main reason for this post was to sound a warning in regards to macs and firewire support. there had been a lot of rumors recently about apple phasing out firewire support (sounds ridiculous, right?) but the latest generation of ipods are usb only (admittedly, consumer products and aspiring always to be more and more cross platform) but the new intel-chip powerbook-replacements, the macbook pro, has no fw 800 port, one fw 400 and two usb 2.0. of course you can buy a pci card that has a fw800 port or two, but just food for thought, i have no real advice there, i'm still going to go fw, but is good to have options... and, nice thing about the owc drives, is that you can have all three, fw 400 / 800 / usb2.0, conections for the drive...
Click to expand...

Yes, the OWD looks to be worth the extra cost, glad you have some positive experiences with them.

David
 
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