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New HD Questions??

stoid

stoid

macrumors 601
Original poster
Feb 17, 2002
4,312
29
So long, and thanks for all the fish!
I want to buy a new 100+ GB HD. Is there any speed advantage to getting internal instead of external?? Are there any HDs that are over 7200rpm?? What are prices doing right now (up or down), I can wait until August if it'll make a big enough difference. I want to use it as video storage for my FCP projects.
 
Make It Firewire!

I bought a 100 GB 7200 RPM Western Digital Drive at Sam's Club for $100 and went out and bought a firewire enclosure with an Oxford 911 chip set and hooked it up. Works wonderfully for everything that i do with it. I use it for a Carracho Server, MP3 server for my house, and digital video.
 
internal hard drive versus like external over firewire? I believe that the internal would be much faster
 
LaCie makes some mean SCSI 10Krpm's, but you pay for it. 36gig external is $500, and 73GB is $900. Compaq even makes a 15Krpm 18.2GB for $500.

Once again, pro of an internal drive: you can hook it up directly as a slave.
Con: It's not portable.

My opinion is go for a 7200 ATA external. ATA's are cheaper to begin with, if cost is a concern for you, and a 7200 shouldn't be that big of a hit on performance. But I'm no expert at video editing hardware, so I'm just going at this from a pure cost standpoint. You get much more for your money with ATA's.
 
i know this is slightly off topic but...when *if* i get a g4 tower the end of the summer (if the prices are more reasonable after july), if i hooked up my 40 gig 7200 rpm drive (with win xp crap o n it) n i used vpc, would vpc recognize it as an ntfs drive n also, could i use that as the XP drive instead of creating a whole new drive image?
 
imho, i think that you should go for the internal.. i have a tower with both, and it seems like the internal drive goes a whole lot faster than the extrernal drive..

it really depends.. if your doing intense stuff with big files that require fast rates, id go for the internal drive. however, if you wanna use the drive with more than one computer, which can be a big advantage for swappin files, then id go for the external.

the thing is, also, that to some extent it doesnt matter. like ppl will recommend external drives for programs like fcp (and video editing in general) although they are slower because fcp doesnt output data faster than the max speed of the external drive. same with apps like carracho.. the highest speeds most servers have are around 150k, which is a ton faster than the max output speed of an external drive.

so basically, i guess, eitehr will work for you. one other advantage of an internal is the OS, for instance the os on the internal drive (10.1) loads faster than my 10.2 OS on my external drive...

good luck!
 
Re: Make It Firewire!

Originally posted by joshb
I bought a 100 GB 7200 RPM Western Digital Drive at Sam's Club for $100 and went out and bought a firewire enclosure with an Oxford 911 chip set and hooked it up. Works wonderfully for everything that i do with it. I use it for a Carracho Server, MP3 server for my house, and digital video.
Click to expand...

How much did you spend on the new enclosure?



Yeah, I'm using it for school projects w/ FCP. Portablity would be great, but not $100 of great. For that much, I'd go through the hassle of disconnecting and reconnecting into a 733 G4 in the lab.


Hemingray, I'm not terribly HD lingo literate. ATA as opposed to...... SCSI?..... Firewire?
 
Originally posted by SilvorX
i know this is slightly off topic but...when *if* i get a g4 tower the end of the summer (if the prices are more reasonable after july), if i hooked up my 40 gig 7200 rpm drive (with win xp crap o n it) n i used vpc, would vpc recognize it as an ntfs drive n also, could i use that as the XP drive instead of creating a whole new drive image?
Click to expand...

I could be TERRIBLY wrong, but I think VPC likes to use its own disk images. Saying this, you could always install XP on a VPC dynamic disk image on the 40GB drive so that it is only the size of the OS and then read the files that are on XP now as a local drive.

Since we already owned the rights for Win2000, we just bought VPC for Dos and installed 2000 on to that. You just have to remember that VPC will NOT have the additions installed if you use this method and, once you have logged onto your WinOS, you have to click the little puzzle piece on the bottom of the VPC screen and tell it to add the additions. VPC says that it has already done this and you just tell it to do it again.

Additions handle sharing local and network drives, drag and drop from Mac to PC and other such things.
 
I'd suggest going internal if you want speed and to not have any additional items either on your computer or desk. Internal will also be faster then through the firewire bus, since that creates a bottleneck (due to the drive enclosure transfer speed). If you can afford it, go for the 7200rpm drive. The 5400rpm drives will be quieter though.

I'd say to go for a 120GB drive. You can either run it off the ATA bus inside your system, or add an ATA133 PCI card. The card could also allow you to use the 160GB drives (check the spec's of the card before you get the drive).

One other thing... I believe that the 120GB and 160GB drives only come in 5400rpm. I recommend getting Maxtor drives, since I have always had good results with them. Also, their support people are very good, epecially when it comes to replacing drives. I had to call them about a Quantum drive, since it went bad, and Maxtor now owns Quantum. I received a replacement drive pretty fast, and shipped the bad one out to them. No problems at all there.
 
Originally posted by SilvorX
i know this is slightly off topic but...when *if* i get a g4 tower the end of the summer (if the prices are more reasonable after july), if i hooked up my 40 gig 7200 rpm drive (with win xp crap o n it) n i used vpc, would vpc recognize it as an ntfs drive n also, could i use that as the XP drive instead of creating a whole new drive image?
Click to expand...

do you plan on running VPC from the 40GB drive or just accessing its data from inside your own new install?? The latter should work just fine.

In fact you should be able to read the HD through UNIX at least anyways if you mount it properly.
 
1. A Firewire enclosure w/the Oxford 911 chipset is fast enough for DV editing.

2. Last I looked into it (a couple of months ago) the 100+ Gig HDDs (internal and external) were having speed issues with DV editing. They were dropping frames on playback and/or capture.


Lethal
 
Re: Re: Make It Firewire!

Originally posted by stoid
Hemingray, I'm not terribly HD lingo literate. ATA as opposed to...... SCSI?..... Firewire?
Click to expand...

As opposed to SCSI, yes. SCSI's costs a LOT more per gigabyte than ATA's, and you also can't get as many gigs with SCSI.
 
Originally posted by AlphaTech
One other thing... I believe that the 120GB and 160GB drives only come in 5400rpm.
Click to expand...

120GB drives come in 7200rpms. i believe maxtor is the only one right now that makes a 160 and it is 5400rpm. but wd makes a 7200rpm 120gb drive (two models one with 2mb cache, and one with 8mb) and i believe (probably wrong about this) that Maxtor also makes a 120gb drive that runs at 7200rpms.
 
Actually, AmbitiousLemon, I just checked Maxtor's web site for their desktop ATA hard drives, and all the new drives that are either 120GB or 160GB are 5400 rpm. The only line they have that goes over 100GB is the DiamondMax D540X (Ultra ATA 133). Those drives are 5400rpm, ATA133 with a 2MB buffer. They do have other lines with 7200rpm spindle speeds, but nothing in those sizes.

Go to Maxtor's web site, select the Desktop Drives - ATA and you shall see what I mean... I took a screen shot so that you can get the rundown without going there, but you might want to anyway. Maxtor makes excellent drives, in my experience, and the 5400rpm drives should not be scoffed at or dismissed because of the rpm speed.
 

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Originally posted by AmbitiousLemon
ok. thought i might be wrong about that (as i stated) but WD is definitely at 7200rpms. just another reason to avoid Maxtor IMO (never liked em).
Click to expand...

I have seen WD drives die in short order, where every Maxtor drive I have had, or has come into where I work (inside systems) are still running strong. That is also in systems that see heavy use all day long by both designers and the page production departments.

I would purchase a Maxtor drive long before I ever even considered one from WD. Next in line would be IBM and then Seagate, but that also depends on the application and interface. For SCSI Seagate is the #1 choice, for laptop drives, IBM. For desktop (and even server) drives, Maxtor is my #1 choice.

I even have Maxtor drives inside the server that I built at work. Those have been running for over 2 years 24/7 without errors or issues. To me, that says tons.
 
alpha - if you had asked me 9 months ago i would have never reccommended a WD drive. WD and Maxtor both have VERY bad reputations. IBM and SEAGATE have been the stars for a long tie (though seagate is know for loudness). but all of this is out of date. all the companies today (as long as you buy a high end drive, like the ones we are talking about) are on equal footing. WD is no longer crap, maxtor is now very reliable, ibm has lost some of its varnish, and seagate finally dropped the prices to be affordable. all and all a very good market for the consumer. take a look at the specs on all the new drives. all the various companies are doing some very neat things with their high end drives. i think you would enjoy reading about some of it since you are a tech guy, its pretty cool how they are tweaking out these drives to make em fast dense and silient (funny how every new generation claims to be below the perce[ption of human hearing).
 
hey.. also.. frys has had some *very* good deals on seagate drives... they seem to be very reliable -- and thats what i have in my enclosure and in the last 3 pcs ive built.. maxtor, however, is usually cheap and is also reliable...

something weird ive noticed though is that on the actual drives themselves they have names.. so on a 60gb seagate i have it says "Barracuda".. which makes sense cause its seagate.. but i have a maxtor 20gb (its kinda older) that says "Caviar"on the top.. is this a joke.. or is there a reason that they call drives fish names? :D

hey also.. my seagate drive is almost completely silent, and i havent doen any modding.. lemon is right -- all drives are fairly equal in reliabvility these days....

also, i agree with lemon, yet again.. that old 20 gb maxtor (about 9 months) was very unreliable for some time and finally the drive completely conked out about a month ago... from what ive heard, though, newer maxtors are much better, just as my seagates are very quiet.
 
Frys is a very large and corrupt computer/Consumer Electronics chain store in the United States.


Building an enclosure isnt as complicated as it sounds. You can but a Firewire enclosure for between 100 and 200 $US. They make it so installing an internal ATA/IDE hard drive in it is as easy as installing the same hard drive inside your computer. Make sure when buying these that the enclosure uses the Oxford 911 chip set. this is the part that forms the bridge between the ATA connection on the hard drive and the firewire connection of the enclosure (put simply). its as easy as opening the enclosure plugging in the drive and closing it back up. pretty neat. :)
 
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