External HD
 

Could someone please help or point me in the direction of a previously existing thread?

I am a college student who will be using AVID Xpress to edit at home and at school. I will need an external hard drive to go back and forth between campus and home.

Here are the questions I have:

1. Does anyone have any recommendations regarding what brand of HD to use?

2. Is there an approximate ratio of #ofGB : minutes of video that a HD can store?

3. Should I go with a regular external HD or an enclosure that can accomodate multiple units?

THANKS!

Andrew

A firewire drive is an internal IDE/ATA drive put inside a Firewire enclosure. The internal drives, IBM deskstars are good as well as Western Digital Caviars. Some people say that the 8MB buffer makes a difference (for non-video tasks it definitely does!). Larger drives also tend to be faster than smaller ones.

For the enclosure, many folks suggest looking for one with the oxford 911 bridge. You can buy a drive + enclosure seperately or together. I don't know which is cheaper.

A great place to buy computer stuff from is newegg.com, but if you can wait you can get a better deal on the hard drive (try sites like fat wallet and the hot deals forum at anandtech).

2- 13.something GB stores 1 hour. Because of some confusion between gibibytes and gigabytes you get 93% of drive space of what it says in the advertising. A 100GB drive would really give you 93GB of useable space. You should try to get a bit more than you think you'll need. Not having enough space is a very bad thing (and it tends to happen).

Don't forget that the amount of disk space to just store the raw video is not enough.

I figure 3 X to 4 X the raw footage space for all the extra files I make, titles, stills, composites, etc. I never seem to have enough space.

I'd go for something above 100 gigabytes. 200 would be better unless you think you will never have more than one project underway at a time.