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Terry Lee January 17th, 2009 01:09 PM

External hard drive question for small video production
 
I have a quick question..

I am shopping for an external hard drive but am not entirely sure I understand some concepts. From my understanding, hard drives set up in a RAID0 configuration is simply where files are spread over two or more hard drives thus allowing information to be processed faster, correct?

To be on the safe side, it is best to have two hard drives of which one will back up the other in the event that one crashes? or does it work like that with RAID..?

For my video editing needs, I will be capturing footage from an HV30 in FCE and then store on an external hard drive that I can then plug up to any other MAC on my campus and edit from. I will be filming a 5 minute video for my class that will be reduced from perhaps an hour of video footage. However, a 2TB external hard drive sounds a bit much and is a bit much in terms of price for purpose. What would you suggest at this level of video capture to be a decent work flow?

Boyd Ostroff January 17th, 2009 01:56 PM

Unless there's some factor I'm overlooking, you can buy just about any firewire drive for this. I have a LOT of different firewire disks going back more than 7 years, mostly firewire 400. I've never had any significant problems using them on a variety of Macs. Most of these were just whatever I could find on sale at the local "big box" stores. Firewire 800 is better if you're copying big files, but 400 should be fine for DV and HDV from my experience.

Terry Lee January 18th, 2009 08:43 AM

Thanks Boyd,

will something like this do?

LaCie | 1TB d2 SAFE Triple Interface External Hard | 301234U

It says its both firewire-800 and 400 as well as USB 2.0

Don Miller January 18th, 2009 09:19 AM

I suggest you start with something like this:

OWC Mercury On-The-Go Bus Powered FireWire, Bus Powered USB 2.0, and eSATA Portable Hard Drive Solutions at OtherWorldComputing.com

These are tiny and bus powered. If you have firewire 800, go with that. Firewire 400 is probably fine too.

Interface speed, from fast to slow, is esata (via expresscard on Macbook pro), FW800, FW 400, and then USB. The last two are pretty close on the newest macs. The newest 500gb, 5000rpm laptop drive from Western Digital is faster than the smaller 7200 rpm laptop drives: Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD5000BEVT 500GB 5400 RPM. About $110 for the bare drive.

The LaCie products are fine too. Whatever you buy I suggest a bus powered notebook drive, as it fits in the pocket of a bag.

Cliff Etzel January 18th, 2009 10:55 AM

Seagate is to release a 500GB 7200RPM 2.5" hard drive next month - pricing I've seen for pre-orders is @$150.00

Seagate info here

This looks to be sweet as a second drive for laptop video editing

Terry Lee January 19th, 2009 11:41 PM

Hey Don,

Those Bus powered drives look awesome. Any experience with them? Something portable would be great but most importantly I would like to get something that will work well with a larger scale work flow. Currently I am working with the HV30, but I may be working with raw footage from a JVC HD GY-200 in the near future. My concern is; can this potentially be the last external hard drive I buy? (unless I break it...)

Thanks for your help.
Terry

Shaun Roemich January 20th, 2009 09:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Terry Lee (Post 997805)
but I may be working with raw footage from a JVC HD GY-200 in the near future.

I shoot with 2 HD200u's and capture to FCP6 in ProRes to a Lacie Triple Interface external using FW400 and I have no issues whatsoever. To clarify an earlier response: FW800 WILL help with file transfers but won't make an ounce of difference with captures, at least from tape based solutions.

Ervin Farkas January 20th, 2009 09:35 AM

If you want to be on the safe side, buy this one and configure it as RAID1. Should one of the two drives fail, you pop the top open and slide in a new drive. No more lost footage/projects.

I have one of them for about a month now and love it! It's large, inexpensive, runs cool, and has all four possible interfaces.

Terry Lee January 20th, 2009 03:15 PM

Hey Shaun,

Something about like this?: LaCie | 1.5TB Big Disk Extreme+ with Triple Interface | 301200U

I've noticed that some of them are configured to RAID1 or RAID0, What is the difference?

Hey Ervin, your external drive I actually had book marked from a previous thread you posted awhile back. But i'm looking for something alittle less expensive. Thanks for your help!

Andy Wilkinson January 21st, 2009 02:49 AM

external hard drives for HD editing
 
There is also a thread going on in the EX1/EX3 section which may have some relevant info in about external hard drives. See here

What type/speed of hard drive do you EDIT with? - The Digital Video Information Network

Shaun Roemich January 21st, 2009 05:38 AM

Terry: That's the one I have working on a project right now except in 2TB.

RAID 0 is two disks striped together for throughput.
RAID 1 is a mirror. Two drives that "mirror" each other for data redundancy, reducing the drive capacity to half: ie. a 1.5TB drive offers 750GB of data storage (give or take).

Jacques E. Bouchard January 21st, 2009 07:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Boyd Ostroff (Post 996476)
Unless there's some factor I'm overlooking, you can buy just about any firewire drive for this. I have a LOT of different firewire disks going back more than 7 years, mostly firewire 400. I've never had any significant problems using them on a variety of Macs. Most of these were just whatever I could find on sale at the local "big box" stores. Firewire 800 is better if you're copying big files, but 400 should be fine for DV and HDV from my experience.

I have a 250 GB bus-powered USB-2 drive that I bought on ebay for $100 CAN. I used it to capture for my last HD shoot and edited off it (while backing it up every night to another drive). It never gave me any performance problems, and it literally fit in my shirt pocket. I love it.


J.

Bryan Daugherty January 21st, 2009 08:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Terry Lee (Post 998133)

Terry, i am a big fan of the Lacie external drives. I have 2 Triple int BDE connected via Firewire 800 and 1 D2 connected via eSata and have been impressed with all of them. B&H has great prices on them but often goes out of stock, if they do you can sometimes order from Lacie Direct quicker. The "Safe" version of the D2 you noted in a thread a few back, has a fingerprint scanner that in my opinion is not worth the additional expense, they do make D2's without them. I have had one Lacie BDE fail after a couple years so like any drive make sure you backup your backup. For portability, i have a WD 250GB bus powered drive and have used it for capturing on my laptop when my editing station is busy editing or rendering and it works quite well for a USB drive, nice to have portability and bus powered options. And I understand Lacie has a few Bus powered drives in their line as well. Whatever you choose, just make sure you back it up because failures happen at the least convenient time always. Best Wishes!

Terry Lee January 24th, 2009 11:04 AM

Thank you everyone for your replies.

With eSata do you need an eSata card? how exactly does that work? I am curious because I hear alot of people saying that it is the fastest route (I suppose it is a faster connection?) However alot of people are just using fire wire, and some USB but fire wire seams to be the performance choice. The computers I will be working with I know have fire wire connections so I suppose fire wire will be my perfered choice.

In terms of disc size, on average I see alot of 500GB drives being used by themselves. I've even seen people just using half that and claiming its plenty and they are storing 1080 (i don't remember if its P or i footage) without a problem. So I might go smaller disc space. 1TB is good but I think I think i'll be fine with 500GB or 320GB and perhaps in the future get a second hard drive to configure on RAID1.

Thoughts on my decision?
Thanks for your help!
Terry.

Shaun Roemich January 24th, 2009 11:40 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Terry Lee (Post 1000244)
In terms of disc size, on average I see alot of 500GB drives being used by themselves. I've even seen people just using half that and claiming its plenty and they are storing 1080 (i don't remember if its P or i footage) without a problem. So I might go smaller disc space. 1TB is good but I think I think i'll be fine with 500GB or 320GB and perhaps in the future get a second hard drive to configure on RAID1.

Thoughts on my decision?

I filled my 2TB drive on one long form project and I'm rendering to an additional 320GB Lacie FW drive but I should mention I capture using FCP's ProRes422 so I use nearly 1GB per minute AND I capture entire tapes, both for convenience in edit as well as archive BESIDES archiving tape.

My position is: I'd rather have ALL my material on one external drive instead of spanning multiple drives as rebuilding the project in the future if necessary for changes (a reality with a LOT of my work) is easier if I only need to mount one drive instead of trying to remember which drives the project lives on. So I bought BIG.

Mike Barber January 25th, 2009 12:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Terry Lee (Post 1000244)
With eSata do you need an eSata card?

Yes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Terry Lee (Post 1000244)
alot of people are just using fire wire, and some USB but fire wire seams to be the performance choice.

eSATA is faster than FireWire. USB is never good for video editing. USB 2.0 is faster than FireWire 400 (the more common "flavour" of FireWire), however it does not have a sustained bandwidth high enough for video performance where as FW does.


Quote:

Originally Posted by Terry Lee (Post 1000244)
In terms of disc size [...] 1TB is good but I think I think i'll be fine with 500GB or 320GB and perhaps in the future get a second hard drive to configure on RAID1.

I would stick between 500 and 750 GB drives. It is better to have more and not need it than have not enough. Especially considering renders, exports, etc. You will find the drive filling up faster than you expected.


Quote:

Originally Posted by Terry Lee
I would like to get something that will work well with a larger scale work flow. Currently I am working with the HV30, but I may be working with raw footage from a JVC HD GY-200 in the near future.

These are both HDV cameras. The file sizes don't change based on the camera, 1 minute of 1080i HDV from the HV30 will be the same size as 1 minute of 1080i HDV from a GY200.

If you are talking about capturing the uncompressed signal from the GY200's analogue component output then you will need both a very large drive (750 GB to 2 TB, depending on project specifics such as length of footage and whether it is 8- or 10-bit uncompressed) as well as a capture card (Kona, DeckLink, etc) or other I/O device (Aja ioHD).

Bryan Daugherty January 25th, 2009 12:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Terry Lee (Post 1000244)
...With eSata do you need an eSata card? how exactly does that work? I am curious because I hear alot of people saying that it is the fastest route (I suppose it is a faster connection?) However alot of people are just using fire wire, and some USB but fire wire seams to be the performance choice. The computers I will be working with I know have fire wire connections so I suppose fire wire will be my perfered choice...

With eSATA you will get the same performance on an external disc as a SATA II (aka SATA 300) If your motherboard does not have eSATA built in you will need a controller card (I have had good experience with my Lacie card) but shop carefully there are eSATA cards and eSATA HDD that are set to the SATA 150 standard, make sure you buy the right one. I use Firewire 800 (aka 1394b) for my external work drives and eSATA for my backup/data recovery.

In my experience, the negligible performance boost of eSATA does not make much difference (for the price) in capturing/editing/daily use (especially when you factor in buying another card and taking another PCIe slot.) Where these discs shine is in large file transfers, the larger the transfer the greater the performance increase.

Firewire also has the advantage of daisy chaining, something you cannot do with eSATA. If your controller has 2 eSATA ports you can hook up 2 eSATA devices. There is one exception to this which is called multi-lane eSATA, these cards have port multipliers (usually by 4) and can be used (depending on the manufacturer) to connect multiple drives via an octopus like cable to one port or with some external raid arrays you connect one multilane cable and then inside the raid array it breaks out into multiple connections.

That's what I know but if you do a quick search on eSATA, i am sure you can get gobs more info with specific data numbers.

Bryan Daugherty January 25th, 2009 12:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mike Barber (Post 1000583)
...You will find the drive filling up faster than you expected...

I find my HDD are like my closets, the more I have, the more I fill up, so I would agree with Mike and recommend more HDD space too.

Mike Barber January 25th, 2009 12:56 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bryan Daugherty (Post 1000585)
In my experience, the negligible performance boost of eSATA does not make much difference (for the price) in capturing/editing/daily use (especially when you factor in buying another card and taking another PCIe slot.) Where these discs shine is in large file transfers, the larger the transfer the greater the performance increase.

IIRC, eSATA also has a greater bandwidth, does it not? This would mean an advantage of being able to play more video streams at once. Doesn't make a difference if you only have one video track, but if you have three or four -- or multi-cam clips -- then this is where eSATA will do you much better than even FW800.

Of course, you make the very good point about the cost:performance ratio. It depends on whether you will experience the full performance of eSATA or not.

My .02¢ for Terry is this: if you are working with HDV or even DVCPRO HD (720p) then FW400 drives will be fine. When and if you step up to working with uncompressed 8- or 10-bit 1080 HD footage, then you will be in a different weight class which will require more power (all around).

Bryan Daugherty January 25th, 2009 02:01 PM

Mike- You make a compelling argument. I have only 1 HDV cam (at this time) and use either DVCAM or DV on my other cams depending on what i am working with. I typically, edit off my four 1TB internal Hitachi Drives (all set to SATA 300) for my own projects, my externals are for client drives (drives supplied by clients that they take back), website and doc files, and backup. When i bought my first quad (USB 2, 1394a, 1394b, eSATA) interface Lacie, i tested editing on it for a month hooking it up via firewire 400, 800 and eSATA, and I finally settled on FW800 for daisy chaining capabilities. I did not see a noticeable difference in editing via the 3 connection types, but I was not editing uncompressed...so it would depend a lot on the workflow. I do see a huge difference between editing on the external client FW800 discs vs. my internal SATA II drives. And would not go back to PATA no matter what. For the external drives though, you add up the cost of drive, controller card and PCIe slot limitations on most computers, and it costs you more than you gain (my opinion) unless you are doing backups.

What i would really like to see is eSATA controller cards with more ports or motherboards with more PCIe slots (without sacrificing other PCI access) or a mulit-lane controller at a lower price point (or better yet on the MB) maybe hooked up to an eSATA hub.

That said, I have edited 7 cam edits on an external FW800 drive with an additional 4 tracks of PSD overlays and it performed fine.

I love eSATA and if I could get all my ext drives to be eSATA that would be awesome but, for me, it goes back to available slots and controller card limitations.

Terry Lee January 30th, 2009 10:29 AM

Hello everyone!
Thank you all for your feedback.

I now have decided on either: LaCie | 1.5TB Big Disk Extreme+ with Triple Interface | 301200U

Or: LaCie | 2TB Big Disk Extreme+ with Triple Interface | 301201U

Really the difference is pay $300 for 2TB or $200 for 1.5TB. I honestly can't make the decision. I'd rather save $100 but would hate to be short in the end. I don't really know that I will be storing this much footage on this hard drive. I will be rendering from tape to an editing system then saving the useful clips and video progress to the external hard drive for later use. Bassically I just need it to store my works in progress on.


Terry.

Mike Barber January 30th, 2009 10:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Terry Lee (Post 1003865)
Really the difference is pay $300 for 2TB or $200 for 1.5TB. I honestly can't make the decision. I'd rather save $100 but would hate to be short in the end. I don't really know that I will be storing this much footage on this hard drive. I will be rendering from tape to an editing system then saving the useful clips and video progress to the external hard drive for later use. Bassically I just need it to store my works in progress on.

Go for the 1.5TB drive. At that price point I would personally rather buy two 1.5TB drives (a combined capacity of 3TB) for $400 than one 2TB drive for $300. Much more efficient use of money and makes sense to scale in that way too. Buy one 1.5TB now and save $100; if you think you might need more (and you should be very good for space with 1.5TB) then scale when you need it.

Ervin Farkas January 30th, 2009 10:39 AM

In your original post you were concerned about security - now you seem to throw your worries out the window... what's gonna happen if your drive crashes?

Both of your choices are RAID 0. I hope you're not going with the Lacie just for the sexier look; the WD I recommended looks bulkier, true... but it's configurable as RAID 1 and it's less expensive, too. Did you know that all Lacie makes is the enclosure? Chances are, the actual drives are the same Western Digital drives inside the Lacie box.

Good luck! You will badly need it if you work without backup.

Terry Lee January 30th, 2009 10:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ervin Farkas (Post 1003870)
In your original post you were concerned about security - now you seem to throw your worries out the window... what's gonna happen if your drive crashes?

Both of your choices are RAID 0. I hope you're not going with the Lacie just for the sexier look; the WD I recommended looks bulkier, true... but it's configurable as RAID 1 and it's less expensive, too. Did you know that all Lacie makes is the enclosure? Chances are, the actual drives are the same Western Digital drives inside the Lacie box.

Good luck! You will badly need it if you work without backup.

Hey Ervin, well I actually planned on getting the one you suggested but its out of stock at B&H :(

Ervin Farkas January 30th, 2009 10:45 AM

Just another sign it's a good choice.

It's available in lots of other places.

Mike Barber January 30th, 2009 10:46 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Terry Lee (Post 1003872)
Hey Ervin, well I actually planned on getting the one you suggested but its out of stock at B&H :(

NewEgg is a good source too, if they have it. Check out if any of dvInfo's sponsors deal in that kind of thing too. I don't know of any that do, I don't pay close attention to the ads. ;-p

Terry Lee January 30th, 2009 10:53 AM

Well I found it here for $225 but I've never heard of that place.

WD 2TB My Book Studio Edition II - CompUPlus Direct

Shaun Roemich January 30th, 2009 11:10 AM

I've said it before, I'll say it again:
Make sure if you buy a WD hard drive that it doesn't spin down when not in use. On the WD's, this is NOT user controllable and can result in real workflow problems during playback. I own a WD MyBook and use it ONLY for DVD image output and miscellaneous files because waiting for drive spool up has ruined several print to tape outputs on my system. Other than that, it's been solid but it's affect on my workflow does not offset the lower price. Of course, your mileage may vary and I DO earn a living at video so I'm less concerned with saving a couple of bucks and more concerned with workflow.

Ervin Farkas January 30th, 2009 11:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shaun Roemich (Post 1003894)
I've said it before, I'll say it again: Make sure if you buy a WD hard drive that it doesn't spin down when not in use.

Shaun, I am curious why does this affect you? What is the setup/software/hardware you are using?

As far as I'm concerned, the fact that WD drives go to 'sleep'... it's a MAJOR PLUS , because I often times leave my computer to render overnight - and the drive(s) will stop spinning shortly after the render is over. Actually this is one of the biggest reasons I use exclusively WDs, both large and small/portable (bus powered): they all run cooler than every other drive I tried, and the big ones go to sleep.

I am really curious what happens in your edit bay; when I go to my PC in the morning, all I notice is that I have to wait 3-5 seconds before I can access my files on those drives. If I look at the content of the drive (in Windows Explorer), it shows all of the files, including those created just before the drive went to standby, so if an application needs to access them, they report 'present', the application should just wait a few seconds to access the actual file...

Shaun Roemich January 30th, 2009 11:57 AM

Ervin: I routinely have media spanning several drives - project media usually resides on a dedicated drive for THAT project and some of my "usual" items live on drives that are constantly attached to the system (FCP6). If on a long form project, the WD spins down, when the timeline gets to the point where media is required from the WD, I get stalled playback, thus ruining a Print to Tape. Therefore, I use only drives that don't sleep in my edit bay, or more specifically, drives that I can CHOOSE to make sleep or not. IMHO, drive sleep should always be a user choice, at least on drives intended for pro or semi-pro use.

Not saying everyone should adopt my methods, just saying drive manufacturers should give US the choice (which virtually every OS does - don't understand why manufacturers insist on negating the OS).

Terry Lee January 30th, 2009 12:37 PM

This is great information but I'm not so sure it CRITICALLY applies to my work flow as it is now. Honestly, I am only going to be capturing footage (720p/1080i ..you know this) to tape after which I will plug (the camera) directly to the 1TB hard drive of a MacPro via fire wire where I will render all the footage (probably in adobe premere), work with it a bit, crop some scenes, delete others and save everything to the external drive to save for further editing. Then when I am done, burn a few DVDs and be done with all the excess footage and perhaps keep a version on the hard drive.

In the future I plan on obtaining my own work station but as of now I'm not finanically stable enough (layed off) to afford a MacPro system with a couple TB of space so I will be using my universities systems to edit from.

I was initially thinking something smaller and more portable but honestly I don't care as long as my work doesn't get lost due to a crashing hard drive or something else.

Bryan Daugherty January 30th, 2009 12:55 PM

Ervin, Shaun, Terry - I have to say I am a big fan of the Lacie Drives but one of my big clients often supplies me with the WD My Book Pro and we have had very few issues with them, I have had problems with the sleepmode on long form edits too, but you can work around it. They are reliable and are usually in stock at staples, officemax, and office depot which means no shipping charges. They are fan cooled so they are generally a little more noisy then my lacies and tend to make a buzzing sound when they first spin up (or wake up.) They can be configured Raid 1 or 0, so the data safety can be a bonus.

I agree with Shaun on the 2 TB vs 1.5TB issue. I often have opted to purchase 2x 750GB instead of 1x 1TB in the past because the $ per GB (or TB) just made more sense and you get the option of configuring one as a Backup drive (lacie's one touch backup software is great) if you want data security. The other thing to consider with Raid 0 is if one drive fails you lose all data on the array, but i am sure you have given consideration to a backup plan.

Ervin Farkas January 30th, 2009 01:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bryan Daugherty (Post 1003973)
I have had problems with the sleepmode on long form edits too, but you can work around it... They are fan cooled...

Never needed so far, but may need to keep them 'alive' in the future. Bryan, what is the trick to keep them from going to sleep?

And are you sure your WDs have fans? I have three of them, the one already mentioned, and two 500GB black blocks - none of these have fans.

Bryan Daugherty January 30th, 2009 01:45 PM

One trick in premiere pro CS3 is to click on the media that you know is on that drive and play it for 5 sec (or until it plays smooth in the preview window) and then do your render, generally it will stay awake because it will encounter this incidence on the timeline before it has a chance to go asleep again which will reset the sleep counter. If it is real deep into your timeline i open up just that drive in a "my computer" window and bring that to the front every 30 minutes or so, as long as something is trying to access that drive it will stay awake.

Fans...I don't know what to tell you here. I went to the WD website and they have done a redesign, the models they show are different than the ones I am using with the round button and round led in front. And even so they don't specify if they are fanless or not. In my experience this thing puts out a lot more airflow than I would associate with convection currents and I hope the load noises I hear when it is working in overdrive are a fan because it can be quite loud (kind of like a hairdryer on the low setting.) If the drive is making those noises than I would be much more concerned about stability.

In reference to your statement "none of them have fans" have you ever opened the case? Perhaps you just have never heated them up enough to kick the fans into overdrive. I did find several people on the B&H website who note this same issue in the reviews on this drive so i know i am not imagining it.

(Speculation alert) One of them claims a firmware upgrade fixed the issue, i would think it more likely that WD replaced the fan in newer units with a quieter one or tweaked the thermal limits so it won't go into overdrive unless it is really hot. But those are speculations.


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