What type/speed of hard drive do you EDIT with?
 

I have a MBP and use external drives for storage like most MBP users. For transfer and storage of my raw BPAV files I use a 7200rpm 500g Seagate drive connected via USB 2. Right now I only use 1 storage drive but I know some people have a backup in case the first drive craps out.

I'm looking for input on what "editing" drive people use. After all my footage is stored, I'll use Transfer to capture just the footage I want and put it on another fast drive that FCP will use for editing. What connection are you using for editing; USB 2, FW 800, eSata? Does it make a difference with handling 1080 footage?

Thanks for any input.

I'm using LaCie Quadras via FireWire 800, none bigger than 500 GB, usually three or four projects per disk, leaving space for media managed backups of movies from other projects.

I've done a couple of 1080 projects, and found that for my current line of work the overhead of processing and rendering for SD & web projects isn't worth the hassle. It's absolutely possible, but I'm just happy at 720p being what DV felt like a couple of years ago. YMMV.

I've got a couple of RAIDs that are dead, some expensive drives (G-RAID, Glyph) that are dead, and cupboards full of lively LaCie Quadras that everyone hates but I love. BTW, I am putting Shotput archives onto BluRay data disks.

The LaCie rugged drives are great for on-site ShotPut disks, as they are FW800 and bus powered. Never trust a foreign power socket.

As for SATA, haven't quite felt the need for it yet.

Hi Chad
New late 2008 MBP.

I use a 7200 FW 800 media drive.Western digital 500GB
ALso a connected Esata 7200RPM drive for archieving, (along with an optical disk backup.)
Also connected is a computer backup/misc Esata 7200RPM.
The esata drives are connected to the expresscard slot.

The media drives should be as fast as possible and esata and FW800 work for EX1 footage that I have shot.

With MBP you want to do eSata through expresscard. There's a more expensive($100) adapter that suppose to be faster than the older model ($40). Sorry don't remember the model.
Then just buy as many drives and enclosures as you need. Any drive is probably fine but I would stay away from the 1.5TB seagate.

A mid size drive:
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD6400AAKS 640GB

Biggest fastest:
Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB

Above 500gb almost all drives are fast. The density needed for such high storage means a lot of data passes under the head each second. A smaller system would use 500GB laptop drives than have dropped in price to `$120. So 2.5 inch laptop drives are about twice as expensive as 3.5 inch desktop drives.

Lacie is fine but remember they don't make hard drives, they make enclosures. Knowing the price of bare drives lets you decide if Lacie is a good value. I do think Lacie produces reliable enclosures.

Edit
Esata is faster than firewire but FW is O.K. USB is NOT O.K. - much slower.

LOL! Quote of the week. Thanks for cheering me up.

Absolutely and utterly agree.

But I have a dear friend and trusted colleague who swears by his USB drives, of which he follows the price of like an avid stock tracker. He's not edited off FireWire for the past year. I'd not want to be in his position, but he's adamant. It can be done, he does it and swears by it. I and many others would swear at it, but we all have our choices in life.

FWIW, he's a fellow EX1 shooter, but has a Z7 (CF) and other stuff too. He was also a DVCPro-HD connoisseur, which I presume was cured by use of USB...

Ciprico 2.5 TB (5-drive RAID - Fiber Channel)
Medea 1.5 TB (5-drive RAID - Fiber Channel)

In my opinion, it's VERY important to go with 5-drive RAID's (if you can afford them). This way if one drive goes bad, the drive will keep on running while you source a replacement. It's kind of like a built-in backup. (we use Leopard Time Machine for that).

Running a 4-drive RAID is just asking for trouble. Don't ask..... I guess if you backup religiously (something that's now easy with Time Machine) you'd be safe.

I'd like to stress that the drive speed is of uttermost importance when editing long gop material. At least if you are using an Avid Media Composer. I recently got two 1 GB drives that I software striped in Windows and compared to USB2-drives the difference is huge. The sluggishness that I noticed dragging the mouse through clips earlier has gone. It almost feels like MJPEG-media.

esata here. got a Macally quad enclosure for I think $89, and 1tb SATA II for $109,
it flies, noticeable speed difference over FW400

Thanks for everyone's input. I think I'll go with an eSata drive for editing, FW 800 if need be.

what about SCSI?
 

Hey folks, what about SCSI drives? I love the performance of my seagate SCSI drives. 10,000rpm all of them. I'm not editing EX files yet, camera hasn't arrived yet. Should I switch to a esata or similar raid, or stay with my SCSI system?

Tom.

Chad, since you are on a laptop, you might look at bus powered options for easier portability. I have the same machine as you, and have done a lot of research. The best options for bus powered drives that are also fast would seem to be the Sonnet Fusion F2 (esata), the Lacie Little Big Disk (esata, FW800/400, USB2), and the Graid mini (FW800/400, USB2). All three offer the speed of raid and the portability of bus power.

The Sonnet is power plug free even on esata, as it gets power through a firewire cable that leaves the firewire data bus untouched.

The Lacie looks great, except if connected with esata or usb it needs to be plugged in for power. Bus powered over firewire.

Graid mini good, too, except no esata.

If you want a great bus powered single drive for backups or for DV editing, try the OWC Mercury-on-the-go. FW800/400/USB2. I just got one and love it. Built like a tank, but small, bus powered and quick. Got great reviews, too.

By the way, though I haven't tried it, this inexpensive esata express card seems to be a good match for the macbook pro, cause it doesn't need drivers:

Newegg.com - PPA 1172 2 eSATA Ports ExpressCard - Laptop Add-on Cards

I'm using a Dynex that I got off Ebay for $10. Works great, but had to download a different driver to get it to work in Mac. The included driver didn't work.

So it seems that I'm wrong that we'll need a fast hard drive to edit XDCAM footage. I made the assumption long ago assuming that do to the more than double the number of pixels (DV vs HD) that it will really tax our hard drives. But now that Sony has figured out how to make it work by only going from 25 to 35mps, I think I was wrong.

So what are we going to do with these high priced RAIDs we've been using for the past couple of years? hehehehehehe

I think those high priced raids will be very useful for anything you choose to edit using an intermediate codec (Prores, 220Mbps at high quality, or Avid's DnxHD). Even looking at several layers of SD footage will work better.

Using 4 Western Digital 640GB drives in a RAID 5 setup. Running off the onboard Intel RAID. Haven't had a hiccup yet. No dropped frames. Getting on average about 210MB/s. Burst read speeds up to 280MB/s. Maybe a bit overkill for EX1 footage, but it leaves me the option of editing higher bitrate material.

Devin, how are you measuring your drive speed/burst rate? It would be cool to know how to do that.

Mitchell, here's a link to the test software that Aja offers for testing purposes. There are a couple DMA tests in there that normally require a Kona card (or similar) to be installed, but the throughput tests should help to establish some benchmarks for you.

http://www.aja.com/ajashare/AJA_System_Test_v601.zip

Nice! Thanks! (I'll give it a try when I get to the office today)

I think it comes down to how many video streams you are trying to work with. I've not noticed any lag using my Macs standard drives at all. My scratch disk is an external FW connected G-Tech G-Raid drive.

For some reason my Mac didn't like the G-TECH G-SATA drive and would often lock up when it was connected so I opted for the more reliable FW800 drive.

Hi there
Do this for a living.

Have used everything from Fry's 1TB Buffalo drives (not recommended) to LaCie and G-Raid 2TB FW800 units on my latest Bravo TV show. (nine cameras, HVDPro HD100 streams).

This works on my G5 as well as the Intels - BUT it's a matter of gross buss bandwidth. The show I'm working on is around 75 hours of HD material across maybe 6TB of drives, all FW800. But in three bus streams of 2TB apiece. In other words, all the built in FW connectors on your computer are going to one bus. I bought slot/bus expander boards for my machines and put two more FW800 cards in each computer, bringing the bus total to 3 per computer. Two TB connected to each proved to be the trick.

When working in Avid, I turn the playlength buffer command down to 1 minute ahead and have been able to get away with editing 9 HD streams off a single bus, but it won't play an entire act or program that way.

Push come to shove, I've cut a show in small pieces, put them together into one timeline, and exported Quicktime (same as source) to get something I could actually watch, top to tail, with no stuttering, etc.

(yes, been there, done that. I actually prefer to do some longer shows this way, and use the Aja TV applet to output the QT to DVD recorders, large screens, whatever. With one simple QT stream, I can then sit back and watch the show, and not worry about will this or that render stack play properly, etc.
I guess I like it because this was the way I first learned to cut sprockets, in the British system with picture synchronisers, squawk boxes, tall editing benches and upright Moviolas with no arms. We only really used the flatbeds for viewing, they didn't have the synch worked out at the time...)

Running one G5 duo and two Quad Intels (Avid 2.8 and FCP 6.0.4 on all) with eSATA backplanes and 4-and 8-drive enclosures with Frys drives (usually Samsungs or whatever 700GB+ drives they've had on sale) and because of the RAID redundancies and the Frys exchange program I simply take the crashed drives back and exchange them.

One old (but maxed out) mirror door G4 is running an LT03 tape backup for long term archiving and also a lightscribe DL-DVD for BPAV and edit project backups. It's also got the Toast .dmg, scanning and printing duties. And it's the firewalled one for Internet connections, but I have laptops on wireless too.

Everything is linked via simple high speed Ethernet. Yes, I have XP and Vista machines running too, a lot of the VFX stuff is on that platform. Common formats are Quicktime and Targa

Transitioning now to something more reliable (I usually have between 8 and 16 drives spinning 24 hours a day when a job is in the house).

Will be switching everything now to drobos. (drobo.com), to do it all more efficiently and with less heartache, no regrets. Don't get the drobo add on ethernet system, they don't have it together properly yet. But the basic system is very nice, especially if you have others working on your computers.

The only ExpressCard for MBP that will work with G-Speed
 

One posed the question of the card that will work with the eSATA RAID from G-Speed. Only the FirmTEK will work right now, $119 USD, per G-Tech. Although true, it would be safer to have a five-drive RAID, I back up everything as I go, as this RAID only has four drives configured at RAID level 0 for highest speed. Also, with that card, you could connect two G-Speed eS units, although you cannot ''RAID'' them.

Tom Parke
ProScan DP

Matt, and all of you with experience on this, which Lacie rugged or other external to you use?
Nowadays you have 500GB but 5400 RPM or 320GB with 7200 RPM

The 500 GB seems to be also really fast via FW800 and some think that because of the high density of the plates it's also almost as fast as the 320GB 7200RPM?

Your inputs are more than welcomed on this, thanks

I've gone with the 7200 RPM because the MacBook Pro internal drives I have are always 5400, and I've historically found editing material on the internal drive to be less pleasurable than editing on a faster external drive. There's lots of reasons for this to be so, but suffice to say that the faster drives handle a few layers of video and I can ingest and lay off DVCAM and HDV to tape whilst doing other things.

As for the lower capacity, Ruggeds are not for long term use. I ingest and edit in the field, then transfer them to mains powered higher capacity drives (and BluRay backup) as soon as I can.

500GB/5000rpm vs 300BG/7000rpm tests:

fast, high capacity notebook drives

Thanks guys,

I'm trying to figure some reasonable plans for longer "field trips" where you can't have too much cargo so might need the large drive for economical offloading the cards and process some footage you have to send out while on the move, as TV field reporters do.

At this point I'm just trying to decide if those 500GB would be better investment versus the 320Gb. This however would work only if the 5400RPM is also able to handle few video streams while editing, and this is the field where I'm lacking of experience.

...perhaps some more inputs will hit in too :-)

Drobo.
 

Chris, can I ask about your proposed Drobo-based system plans? I have been waiting and will wait until Jan/Feb to put together an HD desktop editing suite to replace my last Avid affair. Currently using a MBP but want to accommodate my FLASH XDR system and data rates up to 160 mbps and possibly 10 bit uncompressed.

I'm considering a system nowhere near as elaborate as your studio needs but perhaps with elements which may be similar - a striped (but backed up) system/apps drive (nested in an unused optical bay); internal raid system for current projects (thinking of using Transintl Pro Drives in the internal 4 hard drive slots); and a few Drobos for archive/backup of original media and edits. Is this what you had in mind, albeit on a larger scale?

Jus.

I'm using the free version of HDTune

HD Tune

Personally I never liked the idea of my "RAID" residing inside my computer (internal drives). It seemed to me that it would create a lot of additional heat in a location that's already having to deal with heat issues caused by the CPU and such.

Just my opinion....never actually tried it.

There are so may options with external drive cases, why not build your own external RAID instead of doing an internal RAID?

I am using a EasyRaid with 8 1TB drives set up as raid-5 (7 drives working, one can fail and is replaced with the spare drive) connected to a MacPro via SCSI 320. So far I have edited 1920x1080 in 10bit uncompressed and I get very little dropped frames and such. For editing anything lower than that I had no speed problems whatsoever. I did a gig with 14 Streams of DV multicam with no problems.

Hi Florian
Nice to see you here as well. Got an EX-3 myself.
Haven´t seen you since London Film School. Nice house by the way
I´m looking to get a RAID for my Mac Pro as well, your solution sounds pretty good

It doesn't appear that EasyRaid is currently available here in the States?

G-RAID3 2TB Quad Interface/Sonnet eSATA e34 for MBP
 

I've just decided to wait a little while longer on a Mac Pro.... so as a stop gap I've just bought a 'G-Raid3' 2TB Quad interface External (Raid 0) double drive and a Sonnet eSATA Expresscard 34 adapter. This is for my July 2008 2.5Ghz MBP 200GB/7,200rpm with 4GB RAM and running FCS2.

I'm hoping this new external set-up will work OK (should have it all later this week so then I'll know for sure.....) EDIT: Note that the Sonnet card is NOW showing 1-2 month delivery! - maybe I got the last one in stock! Other suppliers I've found (e.g. the all mac shop) have it but for more money.

The plan is to only put current editing in progress projects on this G-Raid 0 setup and keep all things backed up (in duplicate) on multiple separate external 1TB FW800 drives I already have (as well as the original EX3 BPAV and/or QT files on optical DVD+R DL's).

Hopefully that will all be as disaster proof as I need to go! Links for UK members below:

Sonnet Technology Tempo-e SATAII Express 34 Card Slot 2: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics & Photo

Buy G-Technology G-RAID3 2TB 7200rpm desktop RAID-0 storage solution (eSATA/FW400/FW800/USB2) Mac/Win (GTECH-922303-01) with Free UK Mainland Delivery | AllMacShop

Note that the Sonnet card is NOT the brand new super fast Pro version - the budget did not stretch to £232 ('ish' - currently on amazon uk) - although the review on AMUG for it does looks very good).

AMUG Sonnet Tempo SATA Pro ExpressCard/34 Review

EDIT: and another review http://macperformanceguide.com/Revie...etSATAPro.html

UPDATE 20th Jan: Well the G-RAID3 arrived this morning!!!! Very nice! :-)

Currently, I've got it hooked up to my MBP with FW800 (in a daisy chain with some other drives, all FW800) and it seems pretty quiet and runs cool. I must admit I've not really pushed it yet as I've only just transferred a 100GB project onto it to start editing with. Hoping the Sonnet eSATA Expresscard Adapter will turn up tomorrow so I can try that to see if I can get it to work. My plan is to put all the raw (already backed up elsewhere) EX3 media files on the G-RAID3 (which will be connected with eSATA I hope - but FW800 for now), edit with FCS2 and then save the projects/rendered media files on one of my Freecom Pro FW800 1TB external drives (i.e. not back to the G-RAID so it does not have to read and write at the same time). I will then regularly (daily) back up the project folder on the Freecom Pro 1TB FW800 to another identical drive. If I was rich I would buy a G-SAFE or similar RAID1 device to do this HDD backing up all automatically but me methodically and regularly doing it manually will have to do for now!

I'll post again when I've got the Sonnet adapter - tomorrow is what amazon are promising it's delivery day.

And in case you were wondering, the reason I went for the G-RAID3 is I wanted the eSATA connection option not only for MBP editing connection but also into my Mac Pro - when I eventually get it.

Sonnet Tempo eSATA Expresscard 34 & G-RAID3
 

Well, the Sonnet card arrived this morning. I had some trepidation (as an earlier post in this thread from Tom specifically suggested only another eSATA Expresscard would work with some G-RAID type units, G-SPEED). I did not see why that would be and from my experience today I can confirm that's not true at least for a G-RAID3. I installed the Sonnet driver, rebooted the MBP, the G-RAID3 shows up on the desktop and all seems to be well/I'm editing!

G-RAID3 HDD's 'in use' light is very bright and distracting (someone elsewhere in a web review called it a beacon!). To make sure I'm not staring at it all the time my G-RAID3 is now orientated so that part is facing away from my desk position!!!! Either that or you'd want to put some tape over it to dim it down a bit.

Anyway, I'm happy I've now got a fast, effective and pretty quiet (it makes occasional noises of course when very active) multi-external hard disk solution for EX3 editing on a 15 inch MBP. This will see me through the next few months (until Apple hopefully announce a much awaited update to the Mac Pro, whenever that will be...don't waste time speculating on that one!). I also have a load of small WD My Passport 250GB bus powered HDDs (USB2 only) which are good for in the field backups of BPAV folders etc. Sure they are slower than FW800 etc. but perfectly adequate for backups rather than editing off - and very cheap to buy (about £53 on amazon uk at the moment).

Hope this info is useful for anyone contemplating something similar.

With eSata expresscard/34, be sure to use a solution that uses both connectors (two esata cables). If you use one cable to a port multiplier it will only run at half speed.

Some of the less expensive raid 5 boxes are not any faster than a single drive. For best performance it's probably best to not use raid 5 on a MBP. Raid 0 with good backup is considerably faster than a single cable raid five.

Except for the newest Sonnet Pro card, one fast desktop hard drive maxes out one expresscard eSata connection. I can get ~150MB/sec with two Samsung 1TB drives on raid 0 (2.4ghz MBP). Four drives was not meaningfully faster.

Thanks for the information Don - I'm still getting up to speed with understanding eSATA/RAID etc. (please forgive the pun!) so this kind input is very useful. Thanks!

Even at half speed on an eSATA connection, the G-RAID3 is still going to be faster than if I use the FW800, correct????? (albeit not as fast as I'd hoped!)

I'm living dangerously, I know, but I edit on 2 internal 1TB 7200RPM Seagate drives, internal via SATA. I backup to a 1TB drive that connects via FW400 (a WD external drive)

Indeed, the reason I switched over to a PC/Windows workflow from FCP was to increase my HD speed. Previously I was editing on a MacBookPro, but I couldn't get eSATA stable on the system via expresscard (despite trying three seperate cards,) and I was stuck editing via USB. SLOW AS HELL.

Never going back to Mac again, I can tell you that now.

Well I'm 24hrs into editing with this new disc set-up and I must admit I've had at least 6 crashes of FCP even though the project is not (yet) that complex and only 1 minute long so far. EX3 1080p video on the timeline (mainly 2 streams and 6 streams of audio). Not had these issues before, at all, when using just a MBP on a similar project.

So now, after Brian's comments I'm wondering if I need to hook the G-RAID3 up via FW800 and see if that's more stable.....

My MBP is also driving my 24-inch Dell 2408WFP (which it typically does just fine/rather well). It seems that as of the last 24hrs if I edit around (at the typical fast speed I can work in FCP) the processor or graphics card.... or something.... can't keep up and it crashes ("OSX Quit Unexpectedly" etc.). Maybe I'm doing something wrong somewhere/need to change some settings in FCP?

I don't want to hijack this thread and make it a FCP/eSATA/G-RAID problem solving one for my specific set-up but, just in case the solution is obvious to someone right now, I'd love to hear some suggestions!!!! Anyone got any ideas/experiences to share?

Depending on how I get on I might start a new thread on this specific problem soon.

Edit 1. Up and running on FW800 - so far so good.

Edit 2. Been hard at it for 9 hours and now I've an increasing complex/fast moving and exciting corporate video project which is now 3 minutes long (involving a major UK pharmaceutical company). Not one crash and everything is running superbly well, fast and stable. The acid test would be for me to switch back to the eSATA link (from the current FW800) and see if the problems return. However, I'm on a great roll with this video so not today!!!!

Edit 3. 12 hrs in and still rock solid on FW800/superb performance. The client is going to really love this video too!

Probably a little bit faster than FW800. It depends on the drive. But I don't think it's giving up much spped to use FW800 over a single cable eSata drive(s).

A note on drive speed.

The specs on a 7200rpm 360GB drives look at bit better than the specs on a 5000 rpm 500mb. But if the 500GB drive is partitioned to 360GB (the first partition, the faster outer part of the drive), it will be faster than the 7200rpm drive.
The outer part of a 1 TB drive will probably be faster on eSata than FW800. But a two year old drive will probably be about the same on either connection.

I've had no eSata instability at all. It's disappointing to hear of problems. (for me, 2.4ghz MBP, Penryn I think). It extremely frustrated to get going on an edit and have it crash. I use Raid 0 in OSX.

A note on USB:

Earlier I said that USB is not O.K. for drives. But I've read test results from the newest MBP that says USB is now about as fast as FW400. So Apple seems to have finally fixed their problem.

But still the only way to get desktop-like drive speeds is with eSata or FW800.

G-Raid - great drives - own 5. No problems.
 

I love and use g-raids on my Mac book Pro. I just got their new 3T drive and cloned my 1T g raid to it with the same name. I already have and filled a 2T already. Everything works great - fast no problems with 5T now. 2 Drives (2T and 3T) daisy chained with firewire 800 and no problems. New drives are even more silent and rock!

Sonnet Tempo eSATA Expresscard34 Adapter & MBP = Crashing
 

Well, curiosity got the better of me so for this morning's work I returned to using the eSATA connection to my MBP for the G-RAID3 (rather than FW800 - see details in my posts above).

Yep, you guessed right. Two crashes of OS-X in one hour. Luckily, I've been saving the FCP6 project every few minutes in case of this.

Returned to FW800 connection and all is well again/have been editing for several hours and on another roll. I'm not wasting any more time on this eSATA card (assuming that's what's at fault - certainly would seem to be the case) as the large Cambridge based client is pressing for a viewing of the corporate video I'm nearing completion on....

I'll try and return the Sonnet to amazon uk for a refund I think....FW800 rules, at least for now!