Lacie 2.5" mobile scratch disc

[Fireburst]

Hi,

Has anyone use a Lacie mobile 2.5" external hard drive 5400rpm USB2 as a scratch disc for Final Cut Pro?

I am looking for a mobile solution but would prefer the external drive to be self powered if possible which rules out the 3.5" drives which need a power brick.

 

[CanadaRAM]

Never tried it.

My guess however is that there would be a performance hit, because USB uses CPU cycles for reading and writing, so it's going to suck away some processor power. Added to the bottleneck of the USB 2.0 interface, and I don't know if you will realize any of the benefit of splitting the scratch off to a different spindle.

Firewire would be better. SATA with an ExpressCard in a MBPro would be even better (yes, I know those are not battery powered solutions...)

 

[poppe]

Hi,

Has anyone use a Lacie mobile 2.5" external hard drive 5400rpm USB2 as a scratch disc for Final Cut Pro?

I am looking for a mobile solution but would prefer the external drive to be self powered if possible which rules out the 3.5" drives which need a power brick.

Hey there. I use the Lacie 2.5 80 GB brink thing that has the orange rubber pads around it. It is aweosme. Plus it has USB hi-speed, Firewire 400 and firewire 800. It works great for my final cut pro stuff. Though I always have to reset the scratch disc when I come back to FCP. - Though I think that is because it is the schools G5, and is always reset at night.

I love it though it is expensive. The only thing I'd be careful of is that I hear some of the smaller externals that don't have fans sometimes will break becasue the transfering will cause it to over heat. Mine works great again though.

 

[Fireburst]

Thanks for the replies. I know USB2 works fine as a scratch disc as many at uni use them but with the 7200 disc speed. I was more worried by the lower spindle speed and the self powered operation.

My camcorder is a Canon which hates any other devices using Firewire at the same time so USB2 is my best option. Thanks for pointing out the combined firewire/usb rugged drive poppe as I think this will fit the bill well and at least I can utilise Firewire in the future when I upgrade my Camcorder.

 

[YS2003]

Ideally isn't a 800 FW external HD better for this type of arrangement? I see many pros use portable Macs (along with the desktop computer). I think they are all using some external HD because of the limited HD space on the notebook unit.

 

[Fireburst]

Ideally isn't a 800 FW external HD better for this type of arrangement? I see many pros use portable Macs (along with the desktop computer). I think they are all using some external HD because of the limited HD space on the notebook unit.

Very few laptops have FW800. I use a Lacie Big Disk at home but it is too heavy to be portable and also FW interferes with captures from my Canon.

For the record noone has had any problems using USB2 for captures within my uni group.