External Hard Drive
 

I use Xh-a1's, Power Mac G5(dual processors), 2 gigs of Ram, and am awaiting the Final Cut Studio 2.

Since I'm upgrading my setup from SD to HDV I will need more storage.

I was thinking of getting a 500gig external hard drive (firewire).

Any suggestions on drives, that will allow me to have a realtime workflow? Will I have issues?

Hi James, I moved this thread to the Mac editing forum since that fits your situation better.

I have a powermac G5 dual 2.5 with FCP 5 and a bunch of external firewire drives...

1-Seagate 500GB
1-WD MyBook 750GB
4-LaCie Porsche 250GB
4-Maxtor 160GB Personal Storage
1-Maxtor 80GB Personal Storage
1-ACOMDATA 100GB
1-WD 120GB

They are all 7200RPM mechanisms with firewire 400 interfaces. No problems with DV or HDV (although I do mostly regular DV). The data rates for DV and HDV are about the same so I don't know that you necessarily need much better than this. But of course faster never hurts, especially for copying and backing up or rendering to an external drive.

Received wisdom is that one should always be working with footage on an external disk - or at least a different disk than your active operating system/boot volume.

I've got about 20 LaCie Triple Interface disks I use with my MacBook Pro. Two key points:

1) They're not connected at the same time! I usually have one or two drives in use at any one time. I set the scratch disk to be the same disk as the project I'm working on.

2) I don't use any single disk larger than 500 GB - I've had nothing but trouble from them and now just stick to 320 GB LaCies. I've been told that any disk larger than 500 GB is mostly doing error correction (not talking RAID here).

HDV's files won't be larger than DV - but having cut a few projects in HDV I tried AIC and found it far nicer to edit with (including colour correction with Colorista, etc). I now see HDV as an acquisition format only.

AIC is about 4x the size of DV/HDV, but IMHO it's worth it. I was about to invest in the Mac version of the CineForm codec but I guess I'd better hold off and check out ProRez 4:2:2 first. Both these formats will be bigger than AIC, but have some advantages that fix AIC's issues.

All these formats will work fine off a Separate FireWire drive unless you like stacking motion and FX layers 10 deep.

After reading numerous horror stories about many external drives, I settled on the G-Tech G-Raid firewire 800 which is getting rave reviews. They use 2 drives, have one start on the inside and work its way out, the other goes the other way, allowing for consistent performance no matter how full the drive gets. Had it a year now, knock on wood, and it works great.

Firewire collision with GL2
 

I am using a Mac G4 w 400 firewire and a Canon GL2 with firewire feed. It is voodoo as to if it will work. I can not count on getting both to mount at the same time. It work with no problems for a week, then not for the next. I am intending to have the scratch disk be the ecternal LaCie 500 gig triple interface Firewire drive. But the majority of the time the capture feature of FinalCut Express 3.5 will not work when the LaCie is mounted. USB 2. is not an option on the G4. I have read scattered reports about some Canon camera and fire wiredrives on other post sites, but no solutions. I think my only option is installing an internal 2nd ATA drive.
Lew Stamp
Akron Beacon Journal