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external drive - HD

puckhead193

puckhead193

macrumors G3
Original poster
May 25, 2004
9,582
874
NY
So i'm 99% sure i'm going to be doing an independent study at school doing HD stuff with our new HD camera and FCS2 machine (as I'm the only one with Final Cut knowledge) Any ways along with upgrading to FCS2 I was thinking of getting a new drive for editing/scratch disk. Besides a tripple interface what are my options in terms of size. Lets say an hour of uncompressed HD is equal to how many gigs? Also brands? Western digital or lacie. I currently have a 250 Gig lacie for backup and i think its starting to fail. ( i hear a grinding noise when I unmount it/turn it off) So i'm a little weary of lacie at the moment
Thanks is advance
 
I have 3 Lacies here at home (80gig, 200gig, and 500gig) and we have about 50+ at my work. None have failed. I guess we are lucky. haha. From what I have worked with, Lacie and Western Digital are great drives. But I know many people who have had a bad experience with Lacie. But I have yet to seen it.
 
You won't be working with Uncompressed HD. And if you try, then don't since it'll most likely be a waste.

Work with DVCPro HD or ProRes422. Both are much easier to handle (relatively)

I'd get at least 500gb for a media drive.
 
There's a lot of anecdotal evidence that the higher-capacity LaCie drives tend to suffer from an above-average rate of failure.

From what I've observed with my LaCie BigDisk triple-interface 500GB drive, I'd say there could well be something in it. The drive consists of 2x250GB drives in a single enclosure (bear in mind it's a couple of years old!). The thing got extremely hot after any sort of robust use. After just over a year, I was getting instances where the drives would 'reset' themselves over and over again - I'd hear the 'clonk--whine' noise of the drive parking the heads then spinning back up to speed.

Reading through some documents about modern HDD behaviour, I discovered that the heads use a 'servo track' on the disk which aids in the positioning of the heads. On power-up, the heads locate the servo tracks and calibrate the stepping between them. It seems that if the platter expands significantly due to heat during use, the servo tracks will not be where the heads expect during seeking. So, the drive's firmware does the reset that I was hearing to recalibrate the heads.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I took the two drives out of the LaCie enclosure and put them in two separate cheap-ish enclosures with better cooling than the LaCie model. They've been running perfectly with no odd noises ever since.
 
bigbossbmb said:
You won't be working with Uncompressed HD. And if you try, then don't since it'll most likely be a waste.

Work with DVCPro HD or ProRes422. Both are much easier to handle (relatively)

I'd get at least 500gb for a media drive.
Click to expand...

how large are the files for less say an hour?
you think 500gb is large enough?
 
puckhead193 said:
how large are the files for less say an hour?
you think 500gb is large enough?
Click to expand...

Well I believe that DVCPro at 50Mbps would be about 26 Gigs/hour. ProRes would be even higher than that (Like 90/hour).

It isn't even totally about how much you can get on the drive, but how fast you can read it off of it. FW800 drives will usually max out between 70-80MB/s. An internal SATA will go up to about 110MB/s (Avg speed). What kind of camera are you shooting with? You may want to do an offline edit and then online the material later so that it's easier to work with.

btw, I x2 those G-tech drives. Those are very popular.
 
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