External Hard drive unit for XDCAM EX Workflow

[Alessandro Zumstein]

Hello, have a little technical question.

I need for my projects an external Harddrive unit. I have intrests for the G-Technology G-Raid series and Western Digital Mybook series.
I see that the Gtech has 32MB cache and the WD 16MB. In any of the harddrives i have the intention to work with FW800.
My question is quiet simple. With my XDCAM EX workflow, what is the better choice and is the chache memory really so important? I don't know

"Pre sorry" for my english

Thanks

[Alister Chapman]

I find that cheap, plain vanilla USB drives work perfectly well. The EX files are small and use very little band width so mega fast drives are not essential.
Obviously a faster drive will improve latency and work better if you transcode to ProRes or similar.

[Andy Wilkinson]

I'm using a combination of FW 800 drives (mostly 1TB) including a G-RAID3 Raid 0 (2TB) for EX3 workflow with a MBP. Seems to work VERY well, as long as I stick with FW800 and not try to use eSATA with the G-RAID3 (a subject of another thread on here.....). Bigger drives (>500GB) tend to have higher data density so can, generally, read faster. Go for 7,200RPM drives.

Lot depends on complexity of your projects and your "expectations" but most people seem to get by just fine with external discs with a FW800 connection. Some, I've read, are not so happy with FW400 or USB connections when using EX1/3's.

Don't know about cache size but most of the larger drives are 32MB only anyway, and it won't hurt!