External drive
 

Hi all.
I'm thinking about an external drive. What's reccomended?
FCP3 on Mac G4
Many thanks

What size hard drive were you thinking of?

For standard compressed DV FireWire codec editing, I have had excellent success with the LaCie D2 drives. They are extremely quiet, fast and very stylish due to the heavy duty metal casing design. Easy to power and easy to loop from one to another. Also easy to upgrade and install new internal drives as capacities increase and prices fall.

I have several D2 drives, including the Big Disk 400GB with 8mb buffer, a couple 200GB 7200rpm D2's and a couple 120GB D2's.

LaCie is currently offering a great deal on some refurb 120GB D2's at http://www.lacie.com/clearance/products/?id=10007.

The 320GB Big Disk is also a good deal at $399.

These drives have a lot of added value such as being extremely quiet, stylish and easy to stack, especially with LaCie's rack option http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10076. Don't forget that each LaCie drive also includes a CD-ROM with LaCie's SilverLining software. SilverLining allows you to re-format a drive for Mac compatibility or PC compatibility, as well as FAT-32 for compatibility on both Mac and PC.

- don

Western Digital
 

there is a pretty good sale going on for WD2000JBRTL at Fry's/Outpost. It gets real good if you believe you'll get the rebate money back.... :) :)

Go with Don's advice. I got myself a 60G and wish I have more space. Go for the bigger drives, spend the money. Although 60 gigs holds a fair amount of footage, with rendering, audio, and flexibility in editing, better go with a bigger drive.

I'm thinking of buying an external Firewire for my Mac by the end of this weeks (friday) and I was wondering what brand you recommend?

I want at least a 200 GB - 300 GB external Firewire drive.

Here's the specs I would like the drive to have:

1) Firewire 400/800

2) Prefer no external electric adapter (want to just plug the drive to the firewire port and is ready to use)

3) 7200 rpm

4) 8 MB buffer

oh yea and a good price and durable drive. Will be using it with two different computers at two different locations.


Any suggestions?

I'd hold off for a week or so. CompUSA (and Fry's) among others often have pretty good sales on Labor Day. With rebates I've seen some killer deals on the 200 gb Western Digital drives - both internal and external.

Also see this thread...

1) to my knowledge only firewire 400 drives exist today

2) to my knowledge this is not possible [too much drain]

3) possible

4) no problem

I own a maxtor personal storage firewire/USB2 drive. It does
7200 rpm with 8 mb cache. Somehow it isn't running very fast
on my systems, but that might be due to my firewire cards....
(not all truly support 400 mbps).

<<<-- Originally posted by William Velasquez : 2) Prefer no external electric adapter (want to just plug the drive to the firewire port and is ready to use)
-->>>

At work we have a couple of the little 2.5" firewire pocket drives that get their power from the firewire port. Can't remember the brand, they're a few years old now and we use them as portable backups. But they are the same relatively slow type drives used in laptops. Don't know if they would work well for video. Maybe some of the newer versions are faster? I would love to hear if anyone is using a firewire bus-powered portable drive with FCP. Would love to have one to take on the road myself.

Aside from that, I have a variety of firewire drives that all work well. I think there's Western Digital 100GB, ACOM 80GB, Maxtor 120 and two Maxtor 160's

Thanks guys for all of your replies.

there are drives with Firewire 400/800

LaCie's 200GB Desktop FireWire 800 + USB 2.0 Hard Drive and 7200 RPM
Plug and play: automatic configuration for Mac and PC
I think it needs an adapter for power (I want to avoid this if possible)

http://www.macmall.com/macmall/shop/detail.asp?dpno=139310

Price $369.00

Also Maxtor makes some Firewire 400/800

hmm

I might wait until the long weekend as Jeff suggested and get a better PRICE!!

--William

The problem with pulling power via the firewire bus is that it is easy to overwhelm it. If you are talking one smallish drive then it's probably not a huge problem. If you are talking multiple drives then daisychaining stops being an option real quick. This is true on USB as well. I have some USB devices that work fine daisychained, others that require being plugged into the port to pull enough power.

If you are using this drive with a laptop then you need to factor the drive's draw into how long a battery will last.

If it's one drive, I wouldn't worry about it too much. I'm pretty sure LaCie makes some bus powered drives and there are others out there. Most of the ones I've seen are the smaller 2.5" drives so you pay a premium for that. OWC might make a bus powered case for standard drives, I can't recall.