Buying a new External Drive
 

hey folks I was wanting to get some simple opinions.
I shoot maybe 3 hours a week on my XHA1.

The final output in Premire Pro CS3 will last about 15 minutes. I capture with firwire.

However, I don't want to have any encoding problems or drive failures again.

I would like to have a 1TB Hard Drive. Money is an issue, but the most important part is that I don't want the drive to be the bottleneck.

What do you recommend?

I was looking through B&H and found these Buffalo's Do you know much about them?
Buffalo | 1TB DriveStation Quattro TurboUSB | HD-QS1.0TSU2/R5

Or a cheaper Model...

Buffalo | 1TB DriveStation Duo External Hard | HD-W1.0TIU2/R1

Save your money. The below drive is inexpensive, plenty fast. It is USB, which should work fine. The drive inside of these enclosures used to be the Samsung, which itself is fast.


Newegg.com - acomdata PDHD1000USE-72 1TB 16MB Cache USB 2.0 / eSATA External Hard Drive - External Hard Drives

While some have had great luck, I've had serious frame dropping issues with editing on USB 2.0 drives.

On numerous systems I have found Firewire 400 drives to be much faster. Firewire 800 is even better but Esata is the ultimate low cost interconnect.

Compared to most on here, I don't do near as much work and don't need as much power. But I don't want to sacrifice any quality. Last week I had a 500GB drive on me and I have lost a ton of work. I need something that I can use effectively and back up on occasion.

I am not familiar with eSATA connections and I don't think my PC has a port for that. I have a couple Firewire ports available so I could take advantage of it. Can I add a ESATA board to my machine? I am aware that Vista has some problems with Firewire ports and it causes the PC to reboot with out notice.

I do have an HDMI port on my machine. I have never used it but am wondering would that be a good option (if at all?)

I've had bad experiences with both firewire and USB. There are many that dispute the merits of each. I don't use either for external drive solutions, except for transferring on occasion.

Adaptec makes the 1225SA eSata controller which I use, it is excellent and it has raid. So if you bought two e-sata drives you could run them in raid if needed. e-sata is my favorite external interface. But you likely don't NEED e-sata. USB or firewire should work fine, they are just slower.

2TB MyBook from Western Digi
 

I bought the 2TB WD MyBook just before Christmas for $330... now it's only $290... oh well.

Western Digital | 2TB My Book Studio Edition II | WDH2Q20000N

It has 4 options to connect, from USB all the way to eSata; you can configure it as Raid0 for 2TB storage or as Raid1 for 1TB mirrored, for maximum protection agains data loss. Should one drive fail, all you need is to push the top to open it, extract the failed drive and replace it - you don't even need a screwdriver.

I think at the moment this is the best bang for your buck!

Do you have to have a special board to attach the eSATA?

Yes, a dirt cheap (starting at $15) PCI board. Buy it at your local store, install it in 10 minutes.

I think I am going to go with this same unit.
How did you configure yours? the 2TB of the 1TB Mirror?

What exactly do you mean the 1TB Mirror? Does that mean it creates a back up of it's self at all times?

You might go to newegg and read the reviews of the drive you plan to purchase.

OK. I am not familiar with the site. But I will dig around and see. Thanks for the notice.

Jeff, there are always a few unhappy people, it's just the way things work. Keep in mind, most of the time if you're happy, you won't waist time bragging about it - only when something goes wrong, you get mad and go online to tell the world about it.

Also, that's only 5 reviews on Newegg. Go over to B&H and see that 21 people think it's a 90% perfect drive (4.5 points out of 5). Also keep in mind that probably the people purchasing from Newegg are your average computer users, while most everyone going to B&H is a highly skilled video professional... who knows how to use computers.

The one "CON" I agree with is that the manual is very poor and explains nothing beyond the initial setup.

And Guy, yes, Raid1 means you write to drive A, but during idle times the software will copy all the data to the B drive. So if either drive fails, the raid controller will notify you, and by replacing the drive you're back in (safe) business.

I appreciate all the feedback and discussion. I have learned alot just from this thread alone. Because, I am not a full timer at this I have not given so much thought to some of these items. I will do my homework and really look inot this. I wish I did not have a Vista Machine for Video edits...but it is what it is...

I do not want to use Firewire for my external link. I also want better speed than USB (I have had some render issues)

Therefore, I am going to set my parameters at:
» less than< $300
» with Raid
» with Firewire, USB & eSATA

I definately want the RAID 1 capability. I currently have a 500GB drive that is dead and have several edits that I don't want to lose. RAID1 would have been useful here.

Jeff,
Do you know of anyone in the Greater Cincinnati area that is good at data recovery?