Portable firewire capture drives for Xl2

[Sean Hegarty]

Hello
I am somewhat new to this technology and I was looking into a portable video capture drive for my Xl2. I have seen the Firestore models as well as the MCE products, but I Can't help but ask what is the deal with the cost? I know this is a specialty business and you want top quality stuff, but when you can buy a 500gig portable hardrive for $100 why does it cost $1000-$1500 for a portable drive that only holds 20% of what the $100 drives will hold? I mean we aren't talking some kind of alien technology here that is only understood by a small few, this should be pretty basic technology that could be made affordable to most of us. What do you think? Or what don't I understand about this?

 

[Huy Vu]

It's that price because you can't just stick a hard drive to the XL2 and expect it to work. You need to program the HDD, set up a way to power it portably, build a casing etc. and all of that cost. You can't really look at the individual parts involved and make a guess on how difficult and expensive it is to design a product.

The other part of it is that it's a niche product. Hard drives are cheap because they're produced in mass quantities and that dramatically lowers cost. The Firestore is a specialized tool made for a small segment of the video market and there's simply not enough demands for them to justify the price being any lower.

 

[Sean Hegarty]

Hello Huy

I pretty much suspected that to be the case. I would really enjoy the convenience of having one but the cost is to prohibitive to justify buying one for myself. Perhaps in the future.

Thanks
Sean H:dankk2: