Specific Firewire HD recommendations?
 

Just got a new XL1s, and I'm going to be editing on a desktop Mac G4 using Premiere 6. I'm looking to get a new external Firewire hard drive and, unfortunately, most of the recommendation resources are out of date.

Ideally, I'm looking at high-capacity drives under about $750 or so. I've heard conflicting info about drive requirements for DV (e.g., the acceptability of 5400 versus 7200 drive speeds). Any specific recommendations? Or, in the absence of specifics, details about what I should be looking for (or where I should be looking) in general?

Thanks, all!

Bill,
I've had a Maxtor 80Gb Firewire drive with my G4 for 6 months and have had no trouble with it. It's a 5400 rpm drive but I've had no trouble capturing to it (with FCP2) or editing from it. I think the drive runs around $300-400.

You might also want to check into Firewiredirect.com. I have a couple of their "small" 30Gb portable drives and they've been very handy! They have quite an array off fw drives to choose from, too.

In Chris' review of the Firestore on the XL-1 Watchdog pages, he makes reference to the cooldrives.com site. They sell a model called the Ice in various sizes. I bought a 60GB 7200 from them, and it works fine on Windows & MAC. I think it was in the $250 range.

I just bought a 7200RPM 80 Gig Maxtor for use with FCP 3.

So far it's rock solid and I've got it loaded about half full.

Here's the best part...I bought it as Sam's Club for less than two hundred dollars.

We are no longer the "video elite", anybody can afford this stuff now.

Mike Avery

Reference my previous post...that is an "internal" drive though.

I have used external firewire drives, but found them unreliable for playback (lots of dropped frames). I use them for storage only.

Mike Avery

There was another recent string on this subject. I also had a problem with dropped frames until I installed a new 1394 card. I was showing a data rate of only around 3-4 Mbps. I bought a Que PCI 1394 card for around 20 bucks. After that, data rate jumped up a bunch, with absolutely no dropped frames. In my case, the firewire ports on my older MAC G3 worked fine for video capture, but would not work very well with the new drive. The new card fixed that. I've since printed a couple of hour+ projects.

About four months ago I got a 7200 rpm ProMax external 75 gig IBM firewire drive (which ProMax has since replaced with a larger capacity model). My drive contains the Oxford 911 chip. So far, it has functioned flawlessly. I copied from that drive to mini dv tape (on my XL1) a 1 hour 20 minute project. There wasn't so much as one dropped frame. Be sure your drive has the Oxford 911 chip.