Advice: Keeping Video on an External Hard Drive

[I'm a Mac]

I have a mid-2007 Aluminum iMac C2E and I have about 50GB worth of HDV video (actually double that; one in the old iMovie format, one in the new) and I want to move one of them (or both) to an external disk. My question is: will editing be really slow? I was thinking Firewire 800 but do you think a USB 2 Drive could handle the job? Or would both be slow?

Thanks for your advice.

 

[MrLatte23]

FW800 is fine, USB is not...

USB's no where near fast enough to use for live editing. FW800 will suffice for HDV, even ProRes and AIC.

 

[I'm a Mac]

You say "will suffice" is that like it'll do the job bearably but.... or is it decent/good?

 

[MrLatte23]

I use FW800...

You say "will suffice" is that like it'll do the job bearably but.... or is it decent/good?

I tried to get the MB/Sec or Mb/sec specs for FW800 and HDV but just replied instead, as I know there's a difference and didn't want to compare apples to oranges for transfer speeds.

I use HDV natively and ProRes without any playback problems in Final Cut Studio regularly. Some of my drives with this footage are 7200 RPM 32mb Cache, SATAII Seagate HD's in OWC Quad-interface enclosures connected via FW800. The Uncompressed 10 bit 1920 X 1080 footage didn't play well, but I converted all of that to Pro Res HQ and never looked back.

 

[LethalWolfe]

FW400 or 800 drives will easily be fast enough for native HDV. HDV, which has the same data rate as DV, can be edited off old 5400RPM HDDs (although you'd obviously get better performance off of newer, faster drives). The Apple Intermediate Codec, which is what iMovie and FCE transcode HDV into, will also perform fine on FW400 or FEW800 drives.


Lethal

 

[I'm a Mac]

I'm thinking of going with the Seagate FreeAgent series. Since I don't really need portability, should I go with the desk model, where I can get 500GB for $160 (Or maybe I should just pay the extra 20 bucks and go for a TB) or should I go with the more-portable "Go" model where it's 320GB of stuff.