Need external hard drive that's compatable with imovie.

[shenanigan]

Hey all, this is my first time on the forum... woot!

Here's the deal...

I bought an external hard drive that according to amazon.com was compatable with mac os 9 and up, but when it came and I tried to save an imovie file on it it wouldn't work. It would save other types of files, but not imovie files... which is pointless because that's all I need it for.

I'm looking for an external hard drive that works with imovie, that is around 300 GB and hopefully under $200.

Any suggestions?

 

[kretzy]

Welcome to MR!

Did you format the HD for OS X? I'm not 100% sure, but if the HD is still formatted in FAT 32 I think the maximum file size is around 4GB which may explain why your movies won't transfer across. If you reformat it to HSF+ (OS X format) there shouldn't be any problem. Maybe give that a go before buying a new one.

 

[Danksi]

Yep Fat32 = 4gb individual file size.

 

[Philberttheduck]

All you gotta do is plug in the harddrive into your mac and open up "Disk Utility". Once there, highlight the harddrive you wish the change. Then go to "Erase" and go to "Mac OS Extended". (apparently journaled is just logging and pretty much unneccesary). Label the harddrive whatever you want. Then click erase.

REMEMBER, THIS WILL PERM. ERASE ALL INFORMATION on the harddrive. But it sounds like a new harddrive so it'll do.

This works if you have OS X. If you had OS 9, i got nothing sorry.

 

[shenanigan]

All you gotta do is plug in the harddrive into your mac and open up "Disk Utility". Once there, highlight the harddrive you wish the change. Then go to "Erase" and go to "Mac OS Extended". (apparently journaled is just logging and pretty much unneccesary). Label the harddrive whatever you want. Then click erase.

REMEMBER, THIS WILL PERM. ERASE ALL INFORMATION on the harddrive. But it sounds like a new harddrive so it'll do.

This works if you have OS X. If you had OS 9, i got nothing sorry.

It worked! I'm so happy, I don't have to buy a new external harddrive or anything. Thank you so much! New best friends! *cyber hug*

Okay, perhaps that was a bit much....

 

[QuantumLo0p]

Are you planning on burning DVD's?

Are you planning on burning DVD's? I had some issues when trying to burn DVD+R DL disks when the source files resided on my Venus DS-3 firewire 400 external drive. I kept getting buffer underrun errors. I believe the hard drive is a ATA-133 7200 rpm with 16 MB cache. I tried burning from folders and also tried Roxio Toast Titanium. When I called Apple about it they said they see that issue quite a bit and recommend having the files on a local hard drive. If you need to use an external drive, a SATA external drive would have better I.O. performance than a fiewire drive.

At any rate, I started working from local hard drives and never made another drink coaster after that. I then bought a second WD SATA 250 GB hard drive which is identical to the factory drive my dual G5 came with. I used that drive for all my working files (DV, pics, music, flight sim scenery, etc-) and it worked great. I burn my DVD movie projects straight from folders and I don't need Toast. I think my burner is a Pioneer DVR-109 but I want to buy a DVR-111. DVD dual layer burning is 8X verses the 4X I have right now.

Also, I recently ended up re-installing OS-X (because of some miscues on my part) and took the oportunity to stripe the two disks with raid 0 and 64K block size. Although software raid isn't as fast as hardware raid, I have noticed a significant performance increase.

Last Fall I was pondering a hardware raid card with two or three Raptor drives in an external housing but it quickly became expensive and I bailed. I decided to limit myself to reasonably priced upgrades until my next PowerMac purchase. Hopefully a Quad-Tel?!

A few things about about raid 0...backup, backup and backup. Striped disks can be very fast but a single drive failure means all the data is gone!

 

[SC68Cal]

This is one reason why Apple needs to put some more work into NTFS compatability. Read-only for NTFS volumes doesn't hack it, and FAT32 is beginning to show some signs of aging when it comes to using large files in a cross-platform environment.

In my personal experience, NTFS read/only is absolutely killing the potential for Apple to take a whack at companies sick of Windows, but not willing to completely burn down their server infastructure in the process. It would make a world of difference just being able to purchase Apple computers, sit them on desks, plug them in, configure them for the network and have a seamless transition, where basically the workers leave for the weekend, and come back to a Apple computer, with little to no change in accessing their personal storage on the network.

 

[alaskanna]

I want to imovie to look a my external hard drive

Hi Folks...first time here. Thanks in advance for your posts. I have a Mybook external drive and I can archive to it from my MacBook just fine, but iMovie can't see it..it shows the icon with the explanation (no access) icon. Is the format issue you are talking about? And in addition, does anyone have a good resource about the library structure on Macs ( I am a fairly new convert)?

Thanks
Anne