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I have another question about an External Hard Drive

C

cujoca

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 24, 2006
205
0
I live in Canada and I was over at Costco the other day looking at the Western Digital My Book Premium 500 GB which was $229.99 and then i stumbled upon the WD My Book Pro Edition 2 which is 1 TB (1000 GB) and i was like wow its only 479.99 which is cheaper than the retail cost online at WD. I was just wondering what you guys thought of this hard drive...link
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=270
I do a lot of high definition video editing so I'm thinking this will be perfect. Each video i edit and store is 85 min long and roughly 50 GB. I'm think it would also be perfect for Time Machine too. It has firewire 400 and 800 so thats great but a huge bonus is a 3 year warranty because most other pre- built external hard drives are usually 1 year and then it ends up malfunctioning 16 months later...I was just wondering if you guys could give me any feedback about this hard drive or any past experience with it.

Thanks alot, sorry for the long note

P.S. Is Western Digital an American company because they sell it for $499.99 on their website and in Canada I can get it for $479.99, but other stores like Staples or the Apple Store sell it for atleast $600, so I'm thinking about doing a price match to get it even cheaper

Thanks!
 
I feel like 1 TB is overkill, but you know whats best for you.

For working with hi-def footage and stuff, you'd probably want to put the final product on blu-ray discs or even back to tape instead of archiving something so big on an external storage.

I think you'd probably want to just keep the external as a work area and even if you are working with HD, wouldnt just a couple hundred gigs be sufficient to edit?

I myself am seeking similar advice too, but for a smaller HD unit. The thread my main questions are on is here:

https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=3482711
 
I once thought 100GB was overkill. Then I thought 500GB was overkill.

Now I'm of the opinion that you can't have enough external storage. If you think it's too much, partition the drive and use it to backup regularly. I've got four external HDs of varying capacity, and it's only a matter of time before they're filled and I have to buy a fifth.
 
eji said:
I once thought 100GB was overkill. Then I thought 500GB was overkill.

Now I'm of the opinion that you can't have enough external storage. If you think it's too much, partition the drive and use it to backup regularly. I've got four external HDs of varying capacity, and it's only a matter of time before they're filled and I have to buy a fifth.
Click to expand...

true, but he's talking about using all that space for archiving large HD movies. It's much more cost efficient to get a smaller external HD drive and back up these large movies to multiple dual layered DVDs until blu-ray backing becomes a more affordable option. dual layered DVDs are what - $1 if you can get a good deal? so a 50gb movie can be backed up to $6 in media costs. I would suggest 1TB of space if you needed it for a whole buncha files that needed to be readily available.
 
Sorry maybe i should have been more specific, I do plan to use 500 GB to back up my C2D iMac, then i figured the other 500 can be used for some High definition content or movies or what have you. But I guess another great bonus I guess is the 3 year warranty. Can someone look at the link and tell me if the specs are alright.

Thanks again!
 
another quick newb question...When someone says daisy chain, what does that mean? I know it has something to do with external hard drives.

Thanks
 
cujoca said:
another quick newb question...When someone says daisy chain, what does that mean? I know it has something to do with external hard drives.

Thanks
Click to expand...

Chaining them all together.. Computer -> FW Drive -> FW Drive -> FW Drive, connected by firewire cables.
 
If you are editing HD video. I assume with FCP or FCE? If so you can always simply blow away the media files and reload them if need be. there is no reason to backup the media file if you have the tapes and a backup of the tapes. Thats why the disks used to hold media are called "scratch disks. But you DO ned to backup the project file.

With HD video speed matters. You could use the drives as a stripped RAID. This would double the speed.

For Time Machine you care much more about reliability than speed. Speed may not matter at all if you schedule the backup to happen at 2:00a every night.

I is best not to use a drive for both live data and for a backup. In fact that would be a bad idea.

The drive itself is great. Buy four of them.

"Daisy chain" means you plug each drive into the last drive. There is no hub. That's just the way Firewire works.
 
Daisy-chaining is where you can hook one hard drive to the Firewire port of your Mac, and then a second FW hard drive can plug into the second FW port of the first drive. This means you don't have to buy a hub for Firewire, as you do with USB. Although you can put theoretically 63 devices on the chain, practically speaking you want to limit it to 4 or so.


The WD 1 TB drive has 2 500 Gb mechanisms in it.
 
That drive will Raid 1 - it is really 2 500gb drives in a case. So you can mirror the data between the 2. Which is what I plan to do WHEN i get it (not if! LOL!). The odds of both failing at the same time - slim, so i'l lhave a handy backup, along with another back up.

And i'm also of the "you can never have too much space" group! OR too many back-ups of your "stuff".
 
S after checking out the specs, do any onf you recommend it? And just to clarify something, I have a Sony Hi Def Mini DV camcorder and I would be uploading the footage and working with it then re-writing over the tape. This is because they are $30 tapes and I can't afford to buy a new tape for everything shoot, granite I will hold onto some of them...The last piece of information to clarify...Why is it a bad idea to have live data and back up data on the same drive?

Thanks
 
cujoca said:
The last piece of information to clarify...Why is it a bad idea to have live data and back up data on the same drive?

Thanks
Click to expand...

Ummm... because if the drive fails, you lose your main data and you need the backup, and the backup is on the drive that just failed, yer hoovered.

Remember that although there may be two drives, there is one bridge board, one power supply, and one cable...
 
Or Should I Still get this one, then maybe get a 500 down the road...
 
If you do get this one, I would certainly switch it to RAID 1 immediately. I don't know if it goes JBOD or RAID 0 by default for the whole 1TB, but that's an accident waiting to happen... particularly if it is RAID 0 default. If a drive goes down, you're in deep trouble.

Putting off getting a backup is a bad idea. I did that a few times. Oh, I said, I'll add one down the road. Big mistake- my existing backup was too small for all my files, and I lost years of pictures, music, and email. Nowadays I'm continually adding storage, and out of 8 HD's, only two of which are in a single RAID 0 array. I now maintain five independent backups, with at least one offline and disconnected from all power and computer connections, up to date at all times. I learned the hard way. Don't suffer the same fate, though for a reasonable human being, a single backup would suffice.
 
so the question remains...do i buy he 1TB WD Hardrive or buy to separate WD 500 GB Hardrives
 
cujoca said:
so the question remains...do i buy he 1TB WD Hardrive or buy to separate WD 500 GB Hardrives
Click to expand...

I think only you can answer that. Do you want RAID functionality? If yes then you need the 1Tb if not then 2x500Gb is less costly.
 
I'm kind of new to this, what is RAID functionality in the first place?
 
cujoca said:
I live in Canada and I was over at Costco the other day looking at the Western Digital My Book Premium 500 GB which was $229.99 and then i stumbled upon the WD My Book Pro Edition 2 which is 1 TB (1000 GB) and i was like wow its only 479.99 which is cheaper than the retail cost online at WD. I was just wondering what you guys thought of this hard drive...link
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=270
I do a lot of high definition video editing so I'm thinking this will be perfect. Each video i edit and store is 85 min long and roughly 50 GB. I'm think it would also be perfect for Time Machine too. It has firewire 400 and 800 so thats great but a huge bonus is a 3 year warranty because most other pre- built external hard drives are usually 1 year and then it ends up malfunctioning 16 months later...I was just wondering if you guys could give me any feedback about this hard drive or any past experience with it.

Thanks alot, sorry for the long note

P.S. Is Western Digital an American company because they sell it for $499.99 on their website and in Canada I can get it for $479.99, but other stores like Staples or the Apple Store sell it for atleast $600, so I'm thinking about doing a price match to get it even cheaper

Thanks!
Click to expand...

I've heard good things about these drives so I would get the 1 terrabyte unit because its all in one and only one wire
 
Tenex said:
I think only you can answer that. Do you want RAID functionality? If yes then you need the 1Tb if not then 2x500Gb is less costly.
Click to expand...

Of course with 2x500GB, you can still do software RAID with OS X. That does mean that both disks would always have to be connected at the same time, but you still have the flexibility to do that.
 
If you are going to get the 1TB drive, maybe you should get it from here:

http://www.buy.com/prod/western-dig...re400-800/q/loc/101/203130582.html?adid=17662

It's only $369. Now I'm kind of thinking about it.

Silentwave said:
If you do get this one, I would certainly switch it to RAID 1 immediately. I don't know if it goes JBOD or RAID 0 by default for the whole 1TB, but that's an accident waiting to happen... particularly if it is RAID 0 default. If a drive goes down, you're in deep trouble.

Putting off getting a backup is a bad idea. I did that a few times. Oh, I said, I'll add one down the road. Big mistake- my existing backup was too small for all my files, and I lost years of pictures, music, and email. Nowadays I'm continually adding storage, and out of 8 HD's, only two of which are in a single RAID 0 array. I now maintain five independent backups, with at least one offline and disconnected from all power and computer connections, up to date at all times. I learned the hard way. Don't suffer the same fate, though for a reasonable human being, a single backup would suffice.
Click to expand...

Is switching to RAID 1 easy to do? I tried reading through the wikipedia thing, but I'm still not quite getting this RAID thing. I'm just going to assume that its a good thing.
 
Rizvi1 said:
Is switching to RAID 1 easy to do? I tried reading through the wikipedia thing, but I'm still not quite getting this RAID thing. I'm just going to assume that its a good thing.
Click to expand...

in a nutshell, RAID is about making many disks into one big disk. but there are a few kinds (only 3 of which i talk about below):

RAID 0 - 2 disks acting as one, with the data going to both disks at the same time. the problem here is that if one drive dies, BOTH are hosed because all the data is shared.

RAID 1 - 2 disks mirroring each other. you loose 50% of your storage space since one disk is a copy of the other, but if either drive dies you are OK because you have all the data on the other drive. this is also slower to transfer data to a RAID 1 because you are writing everything twice.

RAID 5 - commonly thought to be the best solution between space, redundancy, and speed. at least 3 disks, with your data being put on them with "parity" data, or data that will allow you to loose one of the drives, pop it out, pop in a new one, and rebuild the array so you do not loose any data. it still has fast transfers, and you only loose 1/3rd of your total disk space. i use this on my network storage box with 4 x 500GB drives, which give me a formatted total of 1.2TB of redundant storage space.
 
shecky said:
in a nutshell, RAID is about making many disks into one big disk. but there are a few kinds (only 3 of which i talk about below):

RAID 0 - 2 disks acting as one, with the data going to both disks at the same time. the problem here is that if one drive dies, BOTH are hosed because all the data is shared.

RAID 1 - 2 disks mirroring each other. you loose 50% of your storage space since one disk is a copy of the other, but if either drive dies you are OK because you have all the data on the other drive. this is also slower to transfer data to a RAID 1 because you are writing everything twice.

RAID 5 - commonly thought to be the best solution between space, redundancy, and speed. at least 3 disks, with your data being put on them with "parity" data, or data that will allow you to loose one of the drives, pop it out, pop in a new one, and rebuild the array so you do not loose any data. it still has fast transfers, and you only loose 1/3rd of your total disk space. i use this on my network storage box with 4 x 500GB drives, which give me a formatted total of 1.2TB of redundant storage space.
Click to expand...

If the intent is to take this 1TB external HD and make this a big playground to edit footage on, then I'm not sure I would want to sacrifice transfer speed to make this raid 1. Especially since if all my data was lost ever, then I could just reimport everything.

What I would be interested in is making the 250GB FW 400 drive I have that's at home into a Raid 1 configuration because my new macbook pro's hard drive is 120gb so by doing raid 1 on a 250gb, I'd take it down to 125gb, making it a good match in terms of capacity for my powerbook. Sure it's FW 400 and not FW 800, but since this is for back up reasons, I'll do it when I'm sleeping.

Thoughts?
 
i am not the right guy to ask re: working with DV footage. hopefully Multimedia (a member here) will pop his head in and offer an opinion, he knows his stuff.

i do not know how feasible doing a RAID1 with an internal and an external drive is.
 
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