I've recently been told that the Lacie Porsche FW drives are not recommended for editing. Can anybody enlighten me as to why?

I'm using the 160G version with my 15" PowerBook running FCP5. I haven't had any problems, but I also haven't been using it that much. I don't do alot of post, but now I'm worrying about the reliability of the drive.

I think they are not recommended because they only have a 2MB buffer. Most people on these boards recommend 8MB as a minimum. I've found that the Porsche drives perform fine for light DV editing, but they have even worse cooling problems than the LaCie D2 drives. I had one overheat and fail, and I'm not the only person who has had this experience. I no longer believe they are reliable for more than casual use. But I will say it wasn't very hard to recover my data the non-recommended way (i.e. with a screwdriver and a cheap FW hard drive case). At the very least, if you're going to use one, you should back up your non-video project files regularly.

We have a few lying around the office since before I started here. We use them as backup drives but we run all our scratch and what not with the 1.6tb giant drives.

I've been editing a full length feature using two 250GB LaCie Porsche drives, with no problems. We've got 30 hours of MiniDV footage in there, and they've been going strong for a good year and a half.