Hard drives for editing...

lJoSquaredl said:

I burned out a WD drive from Best Buy pretty fast. Took about 6 months of editing heavy efx montages for people to get the read/write speeds down to 40-50mb, so i'm looking for a new one. Are drives like the G-Tech ones worth the money, or would it be better spent getting 2-3 of the cheaper 1TB WD drives? Do you get more time out of the better drives or see that big of a performance difference? I can't see RAID being useful for me, at least at this point in my editing career, but as far as external single drives goes, would a more expensive G-Tech drive be useful compared to "economy" ones?

Also are SD cards with high read/write speeds an option for editing these days? I have a rMBP so i'd assume it has a decent transfer rate altho I haven't checked it out yet.

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No. Editing on even a good SD card would be way-slow. Painfully slow. The SD card is about 10X slower then a good solid state disk

Buy a flah drive. Get one with Thunderbolt if you Mac has TB. Otherwise get USB3 or FW800. The drive only has to be large enough to hold what you are working on. Later to move everything to some archive. Yes it is expensive

About g-tech. They do NOT make disk drives. They make aluminum boxes and they buy the drives for WD, Seagate or whoever gives then the best deal that week.

But g-tech does make the best aluminum boxes and the interface and power supply they put int the box is very good. Aluminum is a good material too. It is very strong and helps cool the drive by acting as a big heat sync. But the disk into is still the same part you can buy from WD, Seagate or whatever.

Flash is the way to go. Here is one for $200 http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Elgato/10024012/

lJoSquaredl said:

I burned out a WD drive from Best Buy pretty fast. Took about 6 months of editing heavy efx montages for people to get the read/write speeds down to 40-50mb, so i'm looking for a new one.

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What does it mean to "burn out" a drive?

Minor point, but G-Tech is a division of HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies). They used to use Hitachi drives, which had a pretty decent reputation. HGST was purchased by WD, so I assume they use standard WD drives now. Seriously doubt you'd find Seagate inside.

kobalap said:

What does it mean to "burn out" a drive?

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Best I can figure is that he has filled the outer tracks with data. This is the fastest area of the disk and then as you use the inside tracks the tangental velocity is less, there are less bits per revolution. So I took his "burn out" to mean he filled the drive about 1/2 full with data. (Not quite an accurate term but then how many people know how drive work?)