Firewire Hard Drives

M

Michael_Lieberman

Active member
Before I purchase a firewire hard drive, I was wondering if there is one that is preferred by you guys. LaCie seems good (wonder what the difference between D2 and non-D2 means), as does ProMax's own drives. Which do you use and why?
 
Re: Firewire Hard Drives

I have several of their drives in FW400 and 800. Never had an issue..a good reason to keep buying, although I'm sure there are several other brand varieties.
 
Re: Firewire Hard Drives

I have one of those Lacie Porsche designed 250's here (FW400, 8 meg cache). It sure gets warm, but it's tiny and spacious for about a dollar a gig. No complaints.
 
Re: Firewire Hard Drives

I third Lacie's strengths. I have been buying their drives now for about four years and have been very happy with them. The new firewire 800's add a nice performance boost.
 
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Personally, I don't find Lacie's to be better than any other enclosure you could pick up for a far lower cost.

But if you don't feel comfortable with sticking a bare drive into an enclosure yourself, then I suppose Lacie's would be fine, as would Maxtor/WD/etc. They're basically all the same, just different case designs.
 
Re: Firewire Hard Drives

Thanks for the suggestions, guys. I really appreciate it.

Another question, however -- do you guys capture your footage via your firewire port and then dump it onto the firewire hard drive or through the firewire port in the firewire drive (I believe most have these)? I heard that one loses quality by capturing through the hard drive -- any truth in that?
 
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I capture from firewire device attached to a firewire port on a card, through to a firewire harddrive attached to a port on the motherboard.

No problems here, but DV isn't all that demanding.
 
Re: Firewire Hard Drives

Michael, its not possible to dump video from the camera to the drive directly (unless you use a device like the Quickstream that has the necessary logic and software built in). I found it important to have separate Firewire ports for camera/deck and harddrives.
I use the breakout-box of my videocard for the cam and deck and a firewire port on the motherboard for the external drives.
 
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Yeah I kept getting error messages when looping the firewire devices mixing camera and drives. Failed delayed write errors i believe. I'd also get dropped frames from time to time, even thought the capture utilitiy said no dropped frames... Problem solved once I put the drive on the motherboard firewire and the camera on the video card.

Vince
 
Re: Firewire Hard Drives

[quote author=Michael_Lieberman link=board=Links;num=1093962651;start=0#7 date=09/02/04 at 07:40:06]Another question, however -- do you guys capture your footage via your firewire port and then dump it onto the firewire hard drive or through the firewire port in the firewire drive (I believe most have these)? I heard that one loses quality by capturing through the hard drive -- any truth in that?[/quote]

I'm assuming you mean setting the capture location in your NLE's video capture tool to a directory on the FW HD as opposed to directly connecting the camera to the FW HD (which is impossible).

If so, then I can confirm that this is entirely possible.  In fact, it's pretty much exclusively how I work these days.  Also, when I used to teach at Uni, this is how I'd how the students work on their projects (we had over a terabyte of disk space on external HDs).

On another note, I'm not sure where you heard it, but there's no way you'd lose quality by capturing this way.  It's not like having to choose between component or composite connections.  It's all data.  The only possible thing that could happen is that you'd get dropped frames, but this is more of a hardware issue (drive not fast enough, congested FW or USB bus, etc.), not because it's an external drive.  
 
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I bought the lacie porsche 160gb and it seems good, but a producer told me a few days his lacie porshe died after 4 months and he lost 2 weeks of an edit.. sucks, but normally they are good.

Do a google search for SOhotank. They make multidrive external enclosures that I saw at NAB in april and they where very cool, they should be out by now.
 
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The thing that seems odd to me about the Lacie Porsche drive (I have one here) is that they have no internal time-out for the motor...meaning even if you shut off the computer and walk away...the drive still continues to spin until you turn it off.

I discovered that this morning when I came into the edit suite and discovered a cold quiet computer and a bleeding hot firewire drive.

Maybe all externals do this, it just seems odd to me.
 
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Some of this makes sense, I apologize for not doing the research and study needed for these things. I have a Powerbook laptop with one Firewire port, so this is why I am so anxious.

If someone has a Powerbook who was in the same position I was in, I'd appreciate them giving me a hand. Some said it's OK to capture footage through the firewire drive itself, others advised against it. One thing I could do as well is just capture footage from one project using my Powerbook HD to store, then open a new project, and import those files while using my Firewire drive.

Thoughts?

And thanks again so goddamn much, I really needed assistance and got far more than that.
 
Re: Firewire Hard Drives

Technically Firewire drives aren't 'qualified' for FCP. What that means is you may have some issues with capturing to your firewire drive since you're using the one port to read from camera and output to the drive at he same time. Some people have good luck, some don't.
Note that your internal drive may be slow on a powerbook. (4200)
Best thing to do is download Granite drives software to do a speed check of it and your firewire drive.
If your PowerBook has a PC slot then you can get a Firewire card (buscard) for it. This provides a 2nd real port so at least data isn't going going in and out of the same port at the same time.
Check 2-pop.com for more recommendations for FCP and other Mac editing issues.
 
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scott is right.. as long as you keep each device on a seperate bus, which means totally seperate controller, you are fine.
 
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I have heard that the LaCies are not really suited for video work, as they are not cooled. Several folks have lost material when they crap out after hours of hard use and inadequate cooling.

My Maxtor has a fan built in, so I hope I will fare OK.
 
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One of the drives recommended most on some editing boards has been Hitachi drives in Wiebetech and Granite digital enclosures. Supposedly betterqaulity at a better price point.
 
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I remember when IBM deskstars drives were some of the most recommended drives for video work.  Nowadays, they're oft-referred to as "deathstars" :)

Honestly, it's pretty much a crap shoot.  Everyone will invariably have a drive failure at some point in time.  The important thing then is your consistency with backups.

BTW, perhaps the reason I have a problem with Lacie is because I know numerous people who bought them and experienced drive failures.  It's not so much that they failed that I don't like them tho, it's that they failed AND they paid so much just for a name!  

And yes, the fact that Lacie enclosures are passively cooled (which is definitely not good for the larger capacity drives out there these days) cannot be a good thing for a heavily used media drive.
 
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