Hard Drive for Video backup suggestions

[Hackcomic.com]

I have a 1.8 G5 and I am looking for a hard drive (400gigs probably) to use as a back up for my mini-dvs. Does anyone have recommendations? My friend says he likes the G-raid drives. Is it better/cheaper to go internal or external? If I go external should I go firewire 400/800 or is 400 good enough?

(I'd like to keep the price under $400)

Also, what is the best way to back up the video? I have about 30 tapes. Does it make sense to import them in through imovie and then "share" them as full dvd quality?

 

[LethalWolfe]

I have a 1.8 G5 and I am looking for a hard drive (400gigs probably) to use as a back up for my mini-dvs. Does anyone have recommendations? My friend says he likes the G-raid drives. Is it better/cheaper to go internal or external? If I go external should I go firewire 400/800 or is 400 good enough?

(I'd like to keep the price under $400)

Also, what is the best way to back up the video? I have about 30 tapes. Does it make sense to import them in through imovie and then "share" them as full dvd quality?

Going internal would be cheaper 'cause you won't have to buy a FW enclosure and FW400 is more than good enough for MiniDV.

The last thing you want to do is compress them anymore than they already are so you'll want to keep them at full DV quality (no sense in destroying the quality of your back-up right?).


Lethal

 

[CanadaRAM]

If it's for backup, you don't need to pay extra for a RAID system. You can use a standard 250 - 400 Gb drive. You also don't need FireWire 800 - it doesn't really matter if you backup takes a couple of extra minutes.

If you are going internal, you will need a SATA drive - there is room for one additional drive in a stock G5.

However, it may be worth your while to do this a firewire external(s), because one aspect of "backup" is to not have the drive physically in your machine, incase the machine breaks down or is stolen...

The cheapest way to do this MIGHT be to buy Firewire cases (such as the MacAlly aluminum 3.5" FW case) and load them with EIDE (Parallel ATA) hard drives yourself. 250 Gb seems to be the sweet spot right now. A bonus is if you build your own, you'll get the drive manufacturer's 3 or 5 year warranty on the drive mechanism, as opposed to only a 1 year warranty on a finished-goods FW drive.

 

[Hackcomic.com]

But I will be putting the video directly onto this hard drive I guess through imovie. I wont be saving it first on the G5 hard drive- it will go right to the new drive. Will a normal 400fw drive be able to do video like this without either crashing/overheating or falling asleep as the video is importing? And then from the saved tapes in imovie- I will want to view them off the drive and make some edits in terms of selecting scenes I want for the dvd extras and then outputting those back out to either mini dv or dvd.

 

[CanadaRAM]

But I will be putting the video directly onto this hard drive I guess through imovie. I wont be saving it first on the G5 hard drive- it will go right to the new drive. Will a normal 400fw drive be able to do video like this without either crashing/overheating or falling asleep as the video is importing? And then from the saved tapes in imovie- I will want to view them off the drive and make some edits in terms of selecting scenes I want for the dvd extras and then outputting those back out to either mini dv or dvd.

Yes, FW400 should be fast enough for all that. FW800 would be somewhat faster, of course, but DV does run at FW400 speed.

What you describe is not generally the definition of "Backup drive". You might call it additional primary data storage.

 

[Hackcomic.com]

Thanks. So does anyone have a good 400FW drive they can recommend?