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External hard drive suggestions…?

acearchie

acearchie

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Jan 15, 2006
3,264
104
I've been out of the tech. specs. game for a while whilst I try and focus on the craft of filmmaking rather than the tools used to create and edit the images!

I am shooting a couple of music videos next week and am looking for two large external hard drives to put all the rushes on.

We are shooting Red Epic so ideally looking for at least 2TB minimum each.

I am looking for two separate drives for two reasons:

  • Cheapness (I think this is still the case)
  • To be able to have two copies in two different locations.
The drives need to be able to withstand being a computer back alongside a laptop whilst we travel around shooting.

I am happy to have powered drives as I think again they are cheaper this way and faster? I have pre-thunderbolt laptop so I think that Firewire 800 is my best option and the ability to daisy chain the hard drives would be great with my one FW800 slot!

If anyone has any tips/suggestions when looking for drives then please let me know. Equally any nightmare stories with certain brands etc. would be great!

Cheers.
 
I've had bad luck daisy chaining firewire since the ports are so temperamental. I tend to use LaCie for editing. As long as it's one drive at a time, I've been ok. I'd look for 7200 rpm if you can.
 
From my experience using R3Ds from RED MX and Scarlet/EPIC, GTECHs have been the most stable on both SAS. Firewire and even eSATA using a variety of Mac Pro's, MacBook Pro's and Mac mini.
Personally I purchased a Sonnet Tempo SSD Pro card with two SanDisk 480s and set them to Striped RAID set.
Along with a GTECH RAID2 4TB, I have no issues with handling R3Ds via RCXPro or FCPX/Premiere and Avid MC.
 
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