I remember reading somewhere in the past about how an external hard-drive is limited to around 15 partitions (or something like that), and how if you go too big, your just paying for space you can't use.

I have a 4 gig P2 card. How big of a hard-drive do I need for 4 gig P2 transfers? Also, do any of you have specific recommendations as to what would be a good, cost-effective hard-drive to get?

Remember, I'm going to be dumping to my laptop in the field (which is a PC), and editing on my desktop in the office (which is a mac.) I must make sure that the video files on the hard drive can be read by both computers (PC and MAC).

Any reccomendations for a good HDD to purchase???
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Don't partition the hard drive. Leave it as big as it is. What you need to do is create a bunch of folders and label them BEFORE you start offloading to the drive, so that all you have to do is drag and drop.

And the size of the drive is up to you. 40GB will get you about 9 cards worth of storage. 60GB about 13 and 80 about 18 cards worth.

I personally use bus powered firewire drives by Acomdata...the Ondago:

http://www.acomdata.com/hdp/fs.html

TWO firewire ports, so you can daisy chain, if needed.

If you're using a laptop, you don't have to partition the drive at all.

If you're using the camera to control the drive, it will create a partition for each card you offload, to a maximum of 15 partitions. But if you use a laptop to do the offloading, no such restriction exists.