hard drives

merc

merc

Well-known member
im about to buy an external hard drive for my mac, for video editing. just wanted to see others opinions before i bought.

thinkin bout goin with the seagate 250gb, 7200 rpm, for 78 dollars at walmart, it looks good to me.

but was also thinkin bout the lacie 250gb, 7200rpm, porche design from b&h photo for 95 dollars.

or the western digital my book essential edition 2.0 320gb,7200rpm for 95 dollars.

anyone know which might be better for video editing?

thx alot.
 
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hey, think you posted in the wrong section but... I would go with a G-tech (I have two of them) or I heard Lacie is good. I personally would stay away from USB drives and go with firewire because I've had trouble with them... if you can spend a little extra on a drive because your data is priceless.
 
I agree. You should go with firewire or SATA--USB is good for backup, but for video editing you'll want the performance of firewire or SATA.
 
Go to the Apple website and read the reviews. Generally, when buying hard drives look for a minimum 3 year warranty, preferably 5 years. If it has a 1 year warranty there is good reason. Nice thing about G-tech is they come pre-formatted for your Mac.
 
Wait! I bought an 500Gb Acomdata E5 USB 2.0 & Firewire 400 ([FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, Swiss, SunSans-Regular]HD500UFAPE5-72)[/FONT] drive for $140 from Newegg.com. It is awesome and I'm actually thinking of getting a new one. The only thing I did to it was reformat it with disk utility (I run os x) to a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format just because I heard that it was more reliable than fat32 with the mac. Its fast and holds a lot:Drogar-Happy(DBG):.

Heres the link: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822216031&Tpk=HD500UFAPE5-72
 
question? going with a cheaper hard drive, the only issues that arise are reliability and speed. CORRECT?

image quality wont suffer? cheaper drives record the same quality image as a more expensive drive would. CORRECT?
 
That is correct merc. The files that are written to the hard drive are the same on every drive but yes with a cheaper drive it is possible to have reliability issues. The drive that I talked about in my last post is fast (7200rpm) so that is not a problem, but sometimes it makes me a little nervous because if you leave it on for more than 5 or 6 hours it gets fairly hot. This is not a big concern though and if it is to you then you can get a fan from radio shack or something. It is definitely worth the price.
 
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Two things that may affect your choices. But first like everyone else said Firewire or ESATA not USB.
So first Seagate drives are fine BUT the external ones they are selling have a auto sleep function that you can't turn off if your on a Mac. This is a super Pain In The Ass. If you don't read or write to the drive for 10-15 min it goes to sleep. It causes all kinds of problems and there is a lot of talk about this issue if you google.
Second Lacie , though they may have improved, were notorious for bridge-board failures (the FW interface) and were so crash prone that they were banned from a number of LA studios (it was sound editors that were using them). I have one that I don't use much and it's USB2 that hasn't had any problems at all but I have a friend who has gone through three Terabyte Lacie's that had major failures in short order. The last replacement seems to be holding up but...
 
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