Good external hard drive for editing

T

taras4444

Well-known member
Hi there, been doing a lot of research on here the past few weeks and am trying to narrow down as to which hard drive to get for editing and my laptop. I now shoot ProRes (just got the samurai) from out of my af100 and edit via cs5.5. I need a good hard drive in addition to my 120gb SSD internal (used for my OS and programs etc), and my 1 TB internal harddrive used for previews, media cache etc. This new harddrive would be for my new media files and the projects etc.

From my research it looks like most people go for the Western Digital ones or the G Tech drives, so I've narrowed it down to the following:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/HITACHI-0G0...=1365675212&sr=8-2&keywords=g-tech+hard+drive

or

http://www.amazon.co.uk/WESTERN-DIG...1-109&keywords=western+digital#productDetails

What do you guys think or do you have a better solution? All advice is much appreciated. Thank you
 
add a 240 gig SSD. To edit a single project, it is big enough. when editing is over, just save on a regular 2 Tb disk and wipe SSD for next project.
 
ive been in the design and video business professionally for 19 years now. and i can tell you TWO facts:

1. lacie and western digital (specifically their "my_______" models) external drive+enclosures have the highest failure rate in the industry
2. EVERYONE will have a different story when it comes to drives.

every time ive had a client call me with a dead drive issue, its been either a wd or lacie. and the ONLY external drive ive ever personally had fail were TWO lacies bought at the same time.

sometimes when a drive "fails" its simply a matter of the enclosure malfunctioning. you can open the enclosure and put the naked drive mechanism into a dock. but sometimes the mechanism itself has been sullied by substandard enclosure components. and in the case of the WD mybook stuff, they sometimes hard-wire an interface that renders the mechanism incompatible with standard docks and cables.

for my uses, i have a small squadron of the mercury elite single drives and raids from owc (macsales.com) and they have never let me or anyone ive recommended them to down.
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/
and they are not much if any more expensive than the crap you'll find from lacie, western digital etc at your local office / electronics store.

g-tech used to be on that par (and may again be) but for a while there after they were purchased by another company a few years ago, i heard several stories of issues with them.

as far as the mercury elite stuff, i had one external power supply fail and owc immediately fed-exed me a new one. and another time i had a package show up in the mail from them. it was a little fan mechanism. the letter inside said that some people had the fans inside their 3tb raids fail. so they were simply preemptively sending new fans to all owners of that product - customer service BABY!

another thing you might consider is a dock+naked drive combo. i also have a pair of these:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/NewerTech/Voyager/Hard_Drive_Dock
theyre handy for smaller clients where i dont need the speed or size of a big raid. you can just pop in and out naked drives at will. at about $50, you can dedicate a single 500gb, 7200 rpm seagate barracuda (or equivalent) to a single client or project and never have to fish around sorting out files between projects...

another company ive had good experience with is caldigit. they specifically serve the design/video/3d industries. their stuff is awesome. solid as hell. but may be overkill for some folks:
http://www.caldigit.com/products.asp
 
Last edited:
We have a hundred or so G Speed eS Pro enclosures with 4 drives each. We have had a few drive failures, but the biggest issue we have are the fans burning out. HGST (Hitachi something something Technologies) will replace the enclosure after some arm twisting.

That being said, the G Speeds are really fast, and the capacities go up to 16TB per enclosure! I would stay away from USB 2. If you have to go USB, make sure it's 3. The eS Pros use SAS, the eS (not Pro) has SATA, and the Q has firewire and USB as well as SATA.
 
Thanks for all the replies guys, think I'm going to go for the G speed one now! Planning on using it for all my project videos/renders. Thanks again!
 
Hey all,

I need to get some HDDs for editing. I'm editing off a Macbook Pro 13", 2013 january model, with 1 Thunderbolt and 2 USB 3 ports + one firewire. I'd like to edit my nobudget feature with this setup, so please keep this in mind.

SHOOTING
How many drives are needed? During shooting I copy files from the SD card to 2 external hard drives. One is backup. The other goes for editing. Is that good solution?

EDITING
I plan to edit from one of the drives mentioned previously. Do I need to add more drives for faster or safer edits? I'm considering USB 3 drives as the Thunderbolt port is reserved for an external monitor (or can I daisy chain it with a G-Drive or Thunderbolt Mybook?).
Should I invest in a new G-Raid with USB3 and Raid1 mirror configuration?

ARCHIVE
After finished I have a few older, smaller-bigger etc.. drives so storing the finished product on several drives is not a big problem.

SOOOOO...
What should I buy?
1 G-DRIVE 2TB? or 1 G-DRIVE 2TB + G-RAID in raid 1 for editing? or 2 G-DRIVES (one for edit, other for backup)?

(((If during edit my edit drive fails, I simply use my seperate G-DRIVE backup drive from shooting which is an exact replica of the edit drive...)))

What you think about this?


+++ WHAT HAPPENS IF A G-RAID (raid 1) DRIVE FAILES????? I just put in a new drive and everything is built up automatically???

+++ G-DRIVES or WD Drives? Currently I have WDs, but really like the form factor of G-DRIVES (and more industry pros seem to use that instead of WD drives...).

+ info
The Thunderbolt port is needed for my external display.
I have two 500GB WD 3,5" bare drives, maybe I could use them in a dock or something with USB 3, for render files or anything??? Maybe one for render files, the other for a 3rd copy during shooting? 500GB is not too much but can store many hours of DSLR raw footage I think.
 
wgzn said:
ive been in the design and video business professionally for 19 years now. and i can tell you TWO facts:

1. lacie and western digital (specifically their "my_______" models) external drive+enclosures have the highest failure rate in the industry
2. EVERYONE will have a different story when it comes to drives.
Click to expand...


I agree with point 1 re Lacie. It's not the drives that go but the Lacie electronics in the interfaces. They may look stylish but they fail faster than any others I have used. I had about 6 Lacie units and they ALL failed though some of the drives inside I reused and they ran n other gear with no problems.

As for WD. I know people who swear by them. This includes my local computer shop who custom build PC's. So point 2 holds :-)

Personally I use Segate HDD's However the stats for Segate, Hitachi, WD all look V good depending on the model you choose. This is all >98% reliability anyway. I have found that it is often the capacity and the range that is more important. FOr a long while the 2Tb drives were unreliable from anyone. Now they are stable. SO there is a bit more to it than make.

Als when buying external drives remember the name on the box eg Lacie may give no indication as the the drive in side the box. Even for Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate etc you want to check the actual model or range in the box.
 
I need to get some HDDs for editing. I'm editing off a Macbook Pro 13", 2013 january model, with 1 Thunderbolt and 2 USB 3 ports + one firewire. I'd like to edit my nobudget feature with this setup, so please keep this in mind.

SHOOTING
How many drives are needed? During shooting I copy files from the SD card to 2 external hard drives. One is backup. The other goes for editing. Is that good solution?

EDITING
I plan to edit from one of the drives mentioned previously. Do I need to add more drives for faster or safer edits? I'm considering USB 3 drives as the Thunderbolt port is reserved for an external monitor (or can I daisy chain it with a G-Drive or Thunderbolt Mybook?).
Should I invest in a new G-Raid with USB3 and Raid1 mirror configuration?

ARCHIVE
After finished I have a few older, smaller-bigger etc.. drives so storing the finished product on several drives is not a big problem.

SOOOOO...
What should I buy?
1 G-DRIVE 2TB? or 1 G-DRIVE 2TB + G-RAID in raid 1 for editing? or 2 G-DRIVES (one for edit, other for backup)?

(((If during edit my edit drive fails, I simply use my seperate G-DRIVE backup drive from shooting which is an exact replica of the edit drive...)))

What you think about this?


+++ WHAT HAPPENS IF A G-RAID (raid 1) DRIVE FAILES????? I just put in a new drive and everything is built up automatically???

+++ G-DRIVES or WD Drives? Currently I have WDs, but really like the form factor of G-DRIVES (and more industry pros seem to use that instead of WD drives...).

+ info
The Thunderbolt port is needed for my external display.
I have two 500GB WD 3,5" bare drives, maybe I could use them in a dock or something with USB 3, for render files or anything??? Maybe one for render files, the other for a 3rd copy during shooting? 500GB is not too much but can store many hours of DSLR raw footage I think.
 
nosys70 said:
add a 240 gig SSD. To edit a single project, it is big enough. when editing is over, just save on a regular 2 Tb disk and wipe SSD for next project.
Click to expand...
Absolutely. SSD prices are plummeting, and the speed boost you get when accessing current projects from modern SSDs is *totally* worth it. I have a 512GB Samsung 830 that I boot my OS from, which has more than enough space for 1 or 2 projects I am actively working on. I keep at least two copies of all of the raw camera MOV files (renamed based on date/time shot and content) on HDDs, but I do not edit from the HDDs. The backups are stored on 1TB 2.5" USB 3.0 disks that I can carry around with me easily, and another copy on a RAID-6 array of Hitachi 7K3000 drives on my off-site server.Long story short, now that you can buy a 1TB SSD for $600 (Crucial M500) or half a TB for ~$300-400, there is no excuse not to edit from a SSD directly unless you are working with uncompressed high-resolution video streams (very rare cases).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top