Any suggestions or warnings for firewire drives? I have a medium size 1.5ghz powerbook with 2 gigs sdram. For use with Sony HDV and Finalcut 5... I think.
I have a porsche which works fine, but it has bad reviews lately. Is Lacie better? Please share you experiences.

You might want to take a look here:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=68082

HTH,

Ron

Get G Tech.

http://www.g-technology.com/

Best

Harry.

Get G Tech. http://www.g-technology.com/ [...]
G Tech drives are elegant and cost effective.

You may also want to consider the LaCie d2 Triple Interface Drives (http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10511) (FW400, FW800, and USB2.0) as they are handy if you're going to move between multiple computers and they each have different interfaces. I've used these for both editing and field capture, and have had no serious problem with them, though they do run hotter to the touch than I'd like, something about quiet vs fan the LaCie people tell me, I think I'd rather hear the fan and know the drive is as cool as can be.

Get G Tech.
http://www.g-technology.com/


G-Tech all the way. Not only are they fast and sexy, they're reliable as well.

G-Raid's unique design, performance and price make this a must have with every editing system. The streamlined case with smooth rounded edges is clearly inspired by Apple, but both PC and Mac lovers will agree… it looks great. But, don't let that cool exterior fool you. G-Raids are packed with enough performance to please most video editors. Each unit includes two 7200 RPM drives, pre-configured as a RAID-0 stripe for maximum throughput. Attach them to a FireWire800 port and you'll be able to run multiple streams of DV or even HDV footage. We even have folks running a couple of streams of uncompressed video off a single G-Raid!

One of the most important factors to consider when purchasing external storage is reliability and sustained performance. When you are editing for hours at a time, your drives are constantly pushing through huge chunks of data. The result of all this activity is heat - the enemy of any hard drive. As the drive heats up, performance drops and if left unchecked, the drive will eventually fail. Each G-Raid has a built-in cooling system that includes a fan and a cooling channel that keeps your G-Raid from heating up – no matter how hard you push it. This is a key factor in maintaining the performance and stability needed for digital content creation.

Gary

I have a Lacie 320 gig drive and like it a lot. I've been using it for a year and a half now, and haven't experienced any issues with it.

Before the Lacie I had a couple of just your normal 7200 IBM drives in firewire housing units, and didn't like those very well -- one of them had trouble being recognized sometimes and sometimes would pop up fine but I'd have trouble rendering and capturing to it for some reason. I finally chucked the housings for those drives, installed them internally in my Mac, and bought the Lacie for my external drive. Happy ending...

I now exclusively use Mercury Elite Pro external FireWire hard drives from OWC because of the 100% reliability of the Oxford chipsets, but I've used drives from G Tech, Lacie, and Granite Digital in the past with no problems whatsoever. I think you'd be good with any of those brands.

I will recommend that you avoid some of the more 'mass-marketed' drives from brands such as Western Digital, Maxtor, Segate, etc. They all make fine drive mechanisms (in fact, I use Segate Baracudda drives), but I've had compatability issues with those cheaper external cases in the past due to the cheaper chipsets they use in the FireWire bride boards (which is why I now use the OWC drives with the Oxford boards). Most of those problems cropped up in some of the earlier versions of Mac OS X, and while those problems seem to be a thing of the past, I'm just a bit gunshy of those mass-market external drives.

2¢

A friend is editing HDV footage on his new Macbook Pro with an external 500G Firewire 800 G tech drive. He has had no problems at all. Go with G!

I have the LaCie Triple extreme and a G-Tech G-Raid haven't had a problem with either one yet

I have some Seagates that I love. No problems at all, and they've gone fine between Macs and PCs.

I have 4 Glyph GT 050 Pros. They work great. Are very stable. Five year warranty, I think. Never lost and data in ProTools or FCP in over 5 years.

I've got three Lacie drives... never had a problem (touch wood!).

I've got three Lacie drives... never had a problem (touch wood!).

In my previous job, I left a legacy of 16 LaCie triple interface disks, plus a few other Lacie capacities - lesson learned: the 1 Tb drive has very noisy fans, unnacceptable in anything other than a rack room. The other larger LaCie disks aren't as nice either. I stuck to the 300 Gb drives, with only one or two attached at any one time. No problems.

Now I'm independent, have a G-Raid 500 Gb as the main scratch drive, but the fan's got noisy as of late (it grumbles like a teenager at a shakespeare recital for the first 5-10 minutes after switch-on, then quietens to near silence).

I've just hooked up my 11th LaCie Triple Interface drive. They're great. Don't go mad and have them all linked up at once, just two or three at a time is fine.

A colleague with a similar number of LaCies has just invested in a SATA enclosure, and buys nude drives to shove in the 5 slots. Whilst this is a very high performance solution, the cost saving over individual disks is also a factor - a nude drive is 60% the cost of the equivalent LaCie. However, it's not the kind of solution that travels well (the enclosure failed recently too), and it doesn't work with a PowerBook, so it's not for me.

LaCie Triples all the way... :-)

I have been using a 1 TB LaCie on a PC for over a year and no failures/issues. (The PC itself has a way louder fan than the LaCie, so I have no gripes about noise.) Recently bought a 2 TB LaCie and felt I got a good deal on it, so hopefully it will work out well.

However, the Amazon.com reviews for LaCies are cause to make one nervous. Endless reports of disk failures--some with warning, some without--and zero help from customer service.

I'm glad to see the reports on LaCies on this forum are mostly positive. I don't care about how hot a drive runs or how noisy it is, but 3 TB of data loss would be disastrous.

Lacie are cheap and have a tendency to sleep a little too long for my liking but they're perfectly adequate for most DV/HDV applications.

They're not that robust, I've had three die on me for various reasons, but as long as you treat them gently and you back-up properly you'll be fine.

G-Tech are way superior, not sure I'd call them sexy but they are a professional solution - you get what you pay for.

Lacie are cheap and have a tendency to sleep a little too long for my liking but they're perfectly adequate for most DV/HDV applications.

They're not that robust, I've had three die on me for various reasons, but as long as you treat them gently and you back-up properly you'll be fine.

G-Tech are way superior, not sure I'd call them sexy but they are a professional solution - you get what you pay for.

Seconded. I quite like my LaCie drives, and none of them have given any bother though I've been warned about their reliability by a data recovery tech.
You've probably found this thread already:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?p=804986

I would go with G-Tech if those who have used both LaCie and G-Tech recommend it. But back up anyway, whatever you get.

If you want the best possible solution for an external drive, you can purchase a bare FW enclosure from OWC (www.macsales.com) and install your own drive of choice. The enclosures OWC makes have the best, most robust Oxford chipsets, their customer service is the best in the industry, and when you pick your own drive you can select an "enterprise class" SATA drive which has a longer warranty and better heat-dissipation characteristics than the standard "consumer" drives.

Right now the Hitachi and Seagate TB drives have the best performance for money and you can get an enterprise-class TB HDD for under $400.

G-Tech are way superior [...] you get what you pay for. If you really care about your data you will, first, buy drives that are designed to run cool with either fans or properly designed heat-sinks (G-Tech Drives qualify) and second, BACK UP YOUR DATA. Drives fail. Work as if they do. That's the reality.

I had a hard drive fail in the middle of a project a few weeks ago. I had a copy of all of the critical files. No sweat. No stress. A copy of your video on a second drive that is off line is good practice for important files, and if you're really careful, keep a third drive off site for the really important stuff. Drives are so cheap these days.

G-Tech Drives are backed by a 3-year warranty and they have good technical support, I know some folks who have had to get drives replaced and it's been done quickly and without hassle. I don't own any myself (being a fan of using bare SATA drives myself), but I did use several of them in a previous job.

As far as LaCie goes, there's no special love there. I've had two fail on me, they seem to run hotter than the G-Techs, maybe that heat sink at the bottom of the G-Tech drives really makes a difference. In the end, though, all drives are delicate electro-mechanical devices always on the brink of failure.