FinalCut and Firewire Hardrives

[JBBoxT]

I would like to purchase a 160 or so Gigabyte harddrive for use with final cut pro. I need one that will work well with My Imac G4 17inch 1ghz model Firewire of course. Will it work well editing to a external firewire hardrive? Can i use it as a scratch disk/render disk. Could anyone recommend any good ones. Are the Laclie on apples site good?

 

[JBBoxT]

also there is a maxtorr 160gig on newegg.com but it has and 8mb cache where as the laclie only has 2mb i can get the laclie for 209 from apple educ discount but the maxtor is 243 on newegg is it worth it
Does cache matter that much??

 

[evolu]

couple of things for you:

cache does matter - the more the better.

The faster the speed of the drive the better 7200 is recommended for FCP.

Keep your project file saved on your mac and your media on the drive - that way if the drive dies you just have to redigitize. Then periodically copy a backup of the project to the external if you'd like a copy there.

Run drive 10 or disk warrior on the drive about once a month.

You could also get 2 smaller drives and set them up as RAID and get faster performance with the same amount of space - never tried this myself but thinking about it.

cheers

 

[LethalWolfe]

as long as the enclosure you choose uses the Oxford911 chipset you should be okay. I say "should be" because FW drives are not bullet proof and they are not offically supported by FCP even though most users (i'd say 95%) don't have a problem w/them.


Lethal

 

[flyboy1701]

firewire drives

I use a series of EZQuest Cobra drives that have worked flawlessly for me over the past year. Currently I have 5 drives totalling 480 gb & use them for broadcast commercial production as well as weddings, industrial/educational videos & programming for Illinois PBS. Somebody will have to really come up with something special to make me give them up !

 

[windwaves]

Re: firewire drives

Originally posted by flyboy1701
I use a series of EZQuest Cobra drives that have worked flawlessly for me over the past year. Currently I have 5 drives totalling 480 gb & use them for broadcast commercial production as well as weddings, industrial/educational videos & programming for Illinois PBS. Somebody will have to really come up with something special to make me give them up !

wow, interesting... I wonder what else could one possibly do with a Cobra drive ??? did you also use it to edit those videos you took on that last last trip of yours to the moon ?

 

[Kiwi-Todd]

I have an 80GB lacie and use it for all of my commercial DV based video work and it has been good and reliable to date (5 months) knock on wood!

I have it partitioned so as I can erase it at the end of jobs to prevent drop outs etc.