G-tech
 

Has anyone used the G-tech firewire drive to edit in HDV w/FCP5.1 Just trying to find out which is the best to purchase. Any help would greatly be appreciated.

Thanks,
Brian

Don't know particularly about G-tech, but it's hard to go wrong these days. Almost all vendors use the same ATA/S-ATA-to-FireWire bridge silicon (Oxford Semiconductor, mostly). The only brand I'd be suspicious about it Maxtor - they have a long track record of Firmware incompatibilities with the Mac OS. If you want something that definitely plays well with the Mac, you may want to take a look at the FW-drive offerings at http://www.macsales.com/ - solid performance for a very fair price.

HTH,

Ron

We've had a FW 800 G-raid that has been running here for over a year. It's been rock solid. We edit DVCProHD with it. I'm sure someone out there has had bad experiences with G-Tech. I can only speak for ours. Before the G-Raid we had a Maxtor external and a Lacie Big Disc that both went bad.

I have a G-Drive FW800 250GB. It has been solid so far and I would buy another one. Editing 1080i60 from an FX1.

I'm still on my old G4. I normally edit DV, but if I had a G5 I'd fill all those drive bays with 500gb drives. This may be better than external drives. This is just based on my experience. I have a Maxtor and a Seagate internal and soon I plan to purchase my first 300 or 500gb internal drive. But keep in mind I do everything inhouse so I don't really travel with my drives obviously. If I were working with a laptop I think things would be different. I hope to have G5 17 inch Mac Book Pro by next year and an HDV camera probably either a Canon or JVC. I am still looking the at Panasonic but I'm leaning more toward the others. But I am looking at G-Tech for storage in the future with the MacBook Pro.

-Nate

G-Tech makes a variety of good hard drives as well as enclosures you can populate with your own drives. The G-Tech enclosures have fans, which not all enclosures have, I like the idea of fans to help with cooling.

Are you on a laptop or PowerMac?

I would consider SATA if your on a PowerMac. FireWire 800 offers more flexibility in terms of easily moving to other machines and can used with laptops with FireWire interfaces without the need for a SATA Cardbus card or PCI card, on the other hand, SATA offers a high perfomance option, especially when you start adding additional drives that end up sharing a single FireWire bus, which begins to slow things down, whereas with a SATA controller card and SATA drives when you configure one drive per channel you get the best performance short of a hardware RAID solution.

I've been using the The Sonnet's Tempo-X 4+4 (4 internal and 4 external channels) along with SoftRAID to configure RAID-0 and RAID-1 disk sets. Right now I have the disks mounted internally with Sonnet's G5 Jam but I've been looking a the G-Tech enclosures for additing additional drives external to the Mac. Another option is Sonnet's Tempo-X eSATA 8 PCI-X card that gives you 8 dedicated channels for connecting external drives to the Mac.

I chose SoftRAID over Apple's Disk Utility becuase of better error reporting, a friendlier interface, and the simplicty of rebuilding failed mirrors. Check out the SoftRAID web site for the details.