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Hard Drive Question

A

AnewMac

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 10, 2004
154
0
The Northern Plains of OK!
My wife and I love digital video editting on our macs. However on our dual G5 our 160 gb hard drive is full and we are wanting to add another one. I am curious as too what you experts would do (besides erasing our precious movies). Should we get an internal, external, or what about a RAID set up? I am not very knowledgable about a RAID setup, please show pity on my grammar and knowledge! :confused:
 
burn them on dvds

you should burn all your movies on dvd's. So if you don;t have one already get a firewire dvd burner. I would recommend adding an internal hard disk as a scratch disc for movie editing, ie leaving it empty and assigning it to your editing software. if you're doing fine with your current 160Gb you should feel better with the above two upgrades.
 
Since you still have an internal bay I would recomend getting an internal as they are the fastest, cheapest, and most reliable. Also if you have filled your 160 with movies I would probably get another 200 then use the 200 only for movies and the 160 for everything else. A raid is really not what you are looking for at this point as those are really only for professionals.

Depending on how often you make movies and how long they are I would get one of these:

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=22-144-324&depa=1
 
For working on video I'd suggest a 2nd internal drive that's 4-5 times bigger than the projects you'll work on. Probably 120GB or higher. I wouldn't store much on it--just use it for editing.

Storage--that's another issue. It depends how big your movies are and if you ever want to work with them again. If you've shot something, edited it, and are done forever and will only watch it on a computer or DVD player then burning to DVD with iDVD or DVD Studio is a good move. If you want to edit them again later and your movies are small enough to fit on a DVD, then you can burn the dv files to DVD. If they're bigger you could span them across multiple DVDs or export them to tape. You could also store them on an external drive. It's probably more secure than DVD-R in the long run, but I'd be afraid to not have a backup in case something happened to the drive.
 
If price is not an issue, go get yourself a nice, big 400 GB Hitachi Serial ATA internal drive. You can install it as a secondary hard drive as a backup or just for video. Or you could use a program like Carbon Copy Cloner to back up your whole system and use the 400 gig drive as your system drive with the 160 left internally as a back up. Or install the OS fresh on the 400, make it the system boot drive, copy over your files to it, and still leave the 160 for a back up.

Either way, back up the important stuff to DVD and/or CD. Just in case.
 
Definitely get an internal HD at the size you can afford. SATA HDs are really simple to install as they don't have any jumpers like the older PATA HDs. Just plug it in and use Disk Utility to format it and you're good to go. Newegg's a great place to buy computer components, their service is 2nd to none. Note: If for whatever reason, the new HD you bought fails, you'll have to go to the HD company's website and request a RMA, Apple Care will not cover it.

And as someone else mentioned, burn your movies onto DVDs to save some HD space.
 
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