hard drives
 

Im looking for a hard drive to store footage from an ongoing project. It would be useful for all the footage to be on one unit but its already approaching 3TB, so is there any system that can 'join' together muliple harddrives into a single searchable device?
cheers

Yes, it is called a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks.) Although you will probably want JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks), which is technically not RAID, because it is not redundant. Many enclosures allow you to do this, you just need to supply your own drives. If you want a very high speed, expandable array, check out this link.

thanks fir the info.im thinking of just going with a few 2TB drive as they need to be carted back and forth to africa so need to be relatively compact. Im thinking the g-raid2 would be nice, any others i should consider,
cheers

Sandy check out Dulce Dulce Systems

They have excellent RAID's that work perfect with intel macs and Apple/Adobe software. I use two 4TB RAIDS and they hook together. Buy quality when you buy a RAID!

paul, thanks for that and although they sound perfect my boss's budget wont stretch that as we are a low budget conservation film training team. Is there any way two of the g-raid2's could be coupled and seen as one drive. Sorry to be so dense on this subject,
cheers

Sorry Sandy I was off line with DVinfo for a day but found my password. That will teach me to be on line all the time and never log off.

As for G-raid2's coupled I have no experience with that set up. But i know if you send them a email they could answer it quickly.

Hi

I've been using this Firmtek 5 Bay enclosure and the HighPoint RocketRaid 2314 card for about 6 months now. Only problem was a WD AAKK 500GB HDD failure in the first week of operation.

I only use one enclosure with 5 x WD AAKK 500GB HDD's and that gives me 2.3 TB of storage. I don't have any Redundancy, ie enclosure is just Raid 0.

What I like about my setup is the ability to monitor the drive temps via the web browser interface and the ability of being able to adjust the fan speed and subsequent noise from the fans in the enclosure. I usually just run it on low fan speed and drives operate at about 28-38 c or 87-101 f

Since I did all my research last year and early this year, it appears mini - SAS eSata cards / systems perform faster.

Here are some links that may provide some interesting reading

AMUG FirmTek SeriTek/5PM 5-Bay SATA PM Enclosure Review

AMUG FirmTek SeriTek/5PM 5-Bay SATA PM Enclosure Review

FirmTek SeriTek/5PM

RocketRAID 4320 with 8 drives and RAID 5, 6

Good luck

Michael

MacPro 8-core
FCS 2

Good Topic
 

This is a very topical subject. I just bought a new (used) IMAC and the 320gb HD is nearly at capacity! Thats without having even started my editing!!!

I need a good external drive and searching options suggest my best option is to utilize FIREWIRE 800 and buy a 1tb drive. I'd really like to keep this in the $200 - $300 RANGE. Would appreciate suggestions and best configs (this way or otherways)

Cheers

I have a large collection of both firewire 400 and firewire 800 drives. Faster is generally better, but your options on an iMac are somewhat limited since you can't add an expansion card.

Keep in mind that the all the firewire ports (400 and 800) share the same bus and are limited by the speed of the slowest device connected. So if you have your camera connected to you iMac to capture, there won't be any advantage to firewire 800 because the system will be slowed to 400. With no camera connected and only a firewire 800 drive you should see some speed improvement for things like large file copies and (possibly) rendering.

It can be hard to find firewire 800 drives in the "big box" stores these days. Just finished a big project, and during the past few months I've bought several FW 800 Western Digital and Iomega drives at Best Buy. There doesn't seem to be much logic to the pricing - have seen the exact same models selling at different costs on different days or at different stores.

Thanks for the response - so as an IMAC owner (2.4ghz) my best options to store is a firewire 800? I realize my transfer from camera will be slow, but my main goal is use the 800 as a master drive to save to when i'm editing in FCP (maybe two so i can have redundancy). I'll check out the big box stores (hopefully I can wait a couple weeks because the best day of the year to buy is coming up very soon!)