External Hard drive suggestions.

J

Jman88

New member
I have the new high end 15inch macbook pro and wanted to know what is a good external hard drive to edit from? I wanted to be able to record footage, and dump the files on the hard drive and continue shooting. Then when ready take the files in the private folder and transcode them in fcp7 and edit from the hard drive.
Firewire 800 or usb 2.0?
RPM?
Brand?
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz
I also have the NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT graphics processor; and NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory option.
 
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I love the rugged lacie drives. Super convenient and you don't have to power them cause they're bus powered. Use the FW800 connection

:bath:
 
Check out the Caldigit VR Mini

http://www.CalDigit.com/VR_mini/

2 drives in a FW 800 configuration. You can stripe them for speed or redundancy.

If you are planning on copying the cards and then re-using them in the camera right away, make sure you copy them to two drives. Start with a fast FW 800 drive as your main drive and then buy an inexpensive 2.5" USB HD for strictly backup. If you go with the Caldigit and mirror the drives, you don't need a separate backup drive.

Don't try editing with USB drives, they just don't cut it.

Cheers

John C
 
I used to have difference external harddrives to store raw footage. Then I realized, when the drive is filled, I need to buy another one that comes with different AC adapters. I ended up have to carry all these Adapters and cables with the enclosure.

Now I use HDD docks connecting eSATA. I also use those trayless rack that mount the drive with SATA interface. It works very well.

Check this out here -:> http://lacolorshop.com/blog/view.asp?id=40
 
If you want good reliability, get an external enclosure with an 80mm fan in it that bathes the hard drive in cool air, and a Hitachi hard drive (they tend to run much cooler than some other widely used brands of HDDs, like Seagate for example), and build your own. A lot of pre-made (read most) external drives are pretty much designed to bake hard drives like they were in an oven - a prime way to induce drive failure).
 
The G-RAID drives are good, but I would recommend getting one with an E-SATA card to get the maximum speed out of those drives. The FW800 connection does allow you to edit with your HMC150 footage, but it can't support multiple streams without struggling. You get more throughput/speed when you utilize the eSATA connections, and you can get cards for under $50.
 
G-Tech are great, but honestly you could use almost any drive. I have done SDE's (Same Day Edits) using a USB powered 7200 RPM WD HD. Sure you can get more fancy than that, but in reality almost any external drive should do the trick!
 
Here's the external HD system I went with. Western Digital 1.5 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive. From NewEgg for $109.99 An "Icy Dock" MB559UEB-1SB FireWire 800 / USB 2.0 Removable Tray Drive Enclosure from Amazon for $99. If you fill up the hard drive, simply slip the old HD out of the Icy Dock put it safely in storage, and replace it with a new, fresh 1.5TB for $109.99.
 
Stay away from the Western Digital Passport FW800, I had a 500gb 'built for mac' go bad on me. Wont mount or work in a mac anymore. And that was with meticulous care and use.
 
For externals, I use the Seagate Free Agent "Xtreme"1.5TB eSATA drives. Besides the esata connection they also have firewire and USB connection options. They are also very fast and dependable. These are used as back-ups for my C drive and for another 1.5TB SATA drive (also Seagate) used for project files. They have a 3 year warranty, and work very well. They are the most dependable that I have yet used. They are a good way to go, for sure.
 
MadHMC150 said:
Stay away from the Western Digital Passport FW800, I had a 500gb 'built for mac' go bad on me. Wont mount or work in a mac anymore. And that was with meticulous care and use.
Click to expand...

I have a Western Digital for mac (witch is the same thing as the PC, just that they do the formating for you) and works great.
Many people say LaCie is the greatest drive, well last year i knew of about half a dozen of them that failed.
In reality there're only two types of harddrives the ones that failed and the ones that are going to fail (100% fail rate on all motorized drives, some sooner some later, but all will fail)

My only advice is get something that fits your needs/budget and make sure you back-up back-up back-up!
I currently have 2 drives identical to each other with all my "private" folders, plus a hardcopy, for that i use DVD+DL, always keep the footage in at least 3 places, I don't delete/erase/format my cards until they're backed up in 3 places

Sorry for the long lecture, but sometimes you have to make a point!

In my case is BACK UP :dankk2:
 
You're right about the failure of drives over time. That is one reason that to minimize the expense related with such potential failures, always look at drives with the longest warranties, bought from resellers who will help back them up. I have had to excercise the warranties on a couple Seagate exterrnals, but always had them replaced quickly through the warranty. And since I do have back-up, copying files back over keeps me going.
I have used Lacie before and while I like the apparent quality of their construction, they do not seem to have the reliabilitry of the Seagates....more failures with Lacie.
 
I just went on this hunt for christmas with my HP Laptop... since the 15" macbook pro no longer has an expresscard slot, you are limited to FW800 which means esata isn't an option. I'm picky and wanted as many different connections on the back as possible and I was originally wanting a seagate freeagent xtreme or the new "Mac" mybook studios with the e-ink display and esata, but the seagate and the WD 1.5tb seem to have suddenly gone off the market just before christmas, perhaps due to drive reliability.

Since I had an expresscard slot available to me, I went with an eSata expresscard and an Icy Dock enclosure that's hot swappabe and had much better build quality than the WD or Seagate for a little bit cheaper than the pre-built drives. It's not a full-on raid setup, but I had quite a small budget, so if you can handle it go with one of the good raid boxes (g-tech, lacie, icy dock, etc.) and enterprise rated drives for reliability.

Oddly enough, I was afraid to go with the 1.5tb WD green drive, since green means slow, but so far benchmarks put it faster than my old 74gb raptor drive! I copied 100gb of data to the drive in about 15-20 mins via esata, while usb 2.0 took several hours to do the same amount of data! Hard drive technology has improved a ton since only a few years ago, it seems. For anyone else looking at esata/expresscards, let me give you some advice. Do some research on the chipset the card uses for compatability with your system, and remember that Sata may be 3Gbps but the expresscard x1 slot only goes up to 2.5Gbps.

Good Luck!
 
I've also yet to have a WD drive fail, i've had seagate, maxtor and Samsung all fail but not any of the WD's i've bought. Act drives tbh
 
To be honest, I've had good reliability with seagates and western digital. It's old fujitsu and maxtor drives from budget desktops that seem to fail on me. I do recall spending $5 or so more for a "RAID" version of a WD drive on newegg, it had a much longer MTBF for enterprise class uses, but everything else was the same as the consumer version.
 
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