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OWC Mercury Pro for external raw footage storage?

Yes, those drives are great for external video storage. I've used several and know lots of people that have used them for video editing and they work great.
 
Realistically, even a good 5400 rpm drive will now completely saturate the FW800 anyway, so as long as the included drive doesn't die it doesn't matter what is in there. There are fewer and fewer FW800 cases available, the Mercury Elite's are pretty much the same price as the others, and looks nice. I think it's a fine choice.

I do all my external storage with do it yourself setups, but the performance of my friends WD My Book LX is almost as good as my Stardom SohoTank with 1TB caviar Blacks. It's well past time for Thunderbolt enclosures.....

For performance, you get just shy of 80MB, that's firewire 800. 300 is with eSATA....
 
Awesome, thanks for the replies. A pair of those will now be on my wish list.

Would it also be worth getting one of OWC's 2.5" bus powered cases for my hard drive (500 GB @ 5400 RPM) from my 2011 MBP as I'm upgrading it to 750 GB @ 7200 RPM? They're pretty expensive though... USD 69.99 for a fire-wire enabled one, 29.99 for just USB 3/2. I suppose the firewire one would be handy, but still.. that's a high price.
 
laserbeam273 said:
So are you saying it won't be good? Would their claim of 300 MB/s be an exaggeration?
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300 MB/S is the interface speed. That is how fast data moves between the computer the cache in the disk drive. What you should care more about is how fast the data moves between the read/write heads and the platters. This ithe just the the bit density times the tangental speed on the disk. In other words, how fast the bits fly under the head. Tyically this is 1/10th of the 300 MB/S speed.

OWC's enclosures are good quality. Buy the empty cases and then put whatever drive you like inside. They make double cases too. But these have a fan and make some noise

If you need "fast" the only way (other than SSD) is a good external RAID box but good ones are expensive.
 
Yeah mightn't be a bad idea to use the old 500 GB as a backup drive - I don't think I'll be hitting over 500 GB on the new one anytime soon, particularly if I got the external drives. And that price is way cheaper, I'll just need to look at the shipping costs of both sites.
 
Neweggs shipping is very reasonable for that enclosure- FREE!!!!

The only issue you will likely have with it is that Apple puts thick stickers on the drives they use, which make them thicker than a plain drive. Some of them have to be peeled off to make them fit in this case, but if you are past warranty on it, that's no big deal. Either way, removing the sticker doesn't hurt the drive at all, since it just a sticker. Most small enclosures have the same issue, nobody else puts stickers like that on the drives they use, so it's not something they really engineer the cases for.
 
AngryRedTicTac said:
Neweggs shipping is very reasonable for that enclosure- FREE!!!!

The only issue you will likely have with it is that Apple puts thick stickers on the drives they use, which make them thicker than a plain drive. Some of them have to be peeled off to make them fit in this case, but if you are past warranty on it, that's no big deal. Either way, removing the sticker doesn't hurt the drive at all, since it just a sticker. Most small enclosures have the same issue, nobody else puts stickers like that on the drives they use, so it's not something they really engineer the cases for.
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That is very reasonable! To Australia also?

It'll only break the warranty on the HDD right? My understanding was that swapping HDD and RAM doesn't void warranty.
 
DOH! My mobile didn't display your location, to my knowledge Newegg doesn't ship internationally at all. Alas, as it is a fantastic deal.

Yeah, if you do have to remove the sticker to get your drive into an enclosure it won't do anything to your factory warranty to anything else on the machine.
 
AngryRedTicTac said:
DOH! My mobile didn't display your location, to my knowledge Newegg doesn't ship internationally at all. Alas, as it is a fantastic deal.
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That's a shame. How do the eBay ones from Hong Kong rate? Or would you recommend not trusting them? May have to just go with OWC then, it's just such a high price though.

Joe Walker said:
I've been thinking about hooking up a USB 3.0 port on my last lane available and using this bad boy for storage:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=wishListDetail.jsp&A=details&Q=&sku=760471&is=REG

It's half the speed of Thunderbolt...supposedly....
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And as for USB 3 vs Thunderbolt, you're right it's theoretically half the speed, but if you're doing two-way stuff, it could be as little as a quarter (Thunderbolt is 10 Gbps both ways simultaneously).

But once fiberoptic comes out, it won't even compare. USB 3 will look like a floppy drive next to a CD-ROM. Wow. :cool:

EDIT: Wait if you're looking to pay $2k for a RAID set up, why don't you just get this?

http://store.apple.com/us/product/H...m?n=thunderbolt&fnode=MTY1NDA0Nw&s=topSellers

Same price really, from my (uneducated) viewpoint the key difference is USB 3 compared to Thunderbolt. The OWC one has a theoretical maximum of 625 MB/s (don't know how much less it will be in reality), and the LaCie has a real life maximum of 800 MB/s. I'd say that's worth it, could end up being close to twice as fast.
 
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I've gone back on my decision and I think I'll get this guy:

http://store.apple.com/au_edu_94094...-Edition-II?n=raid&fnode=MTY1NDA0Nw&s=priceLH

Reason being is that postage from the US to Australia is expensive, probably around $100 for two external 3.5" drives, if not more. So just briefly, this guy will work fine won't it? I'll run it as mirrored (striped will have minimal performance gain wouldn't it?).
 
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laserbeam273 said:
EDIT: Wait if you're looking to pay $2k for a RAID set up, why don't you just get this?

http://store.apple.com/us/product/H...m?n=thunderbolt&fnode=MTY1NDA0Nw&s=topSellers

Same price really, from my (uneducated) viewpoint the key difference is USB 3 compared to Thunderbolt. The OWC one has a theoretical maximum of 625 MB/s (don't know how much less it will be in reality), and the LaCie has a real life maximum of 800 MB/s. I'd say that's worth it, could end up being close to twice as fast.
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Yes but I'm on an older Mac Pro 1,1, so Thunderbolt is out for me, unfortunately.
 
Instead of jamming a USB 3.0 card in your pro, I'd look at this....

http://search.yahoo.com/r/_ylt=A0oG...onnettech.com/product/esataextendercable.html

eSATA stuff is nearly as plentiful as USB 3.0, and for something like a RAID0 setup really fast.

As to the OP, I would shy away from the Hong Kong stuff, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but just not reliable. I'd ship you the stuff myself with USPS flat rate International before I'd recommend the HK route ;-)

The WD drive should do great, I looked at that briefly before my last drive purchase, running that in RAID1 with FW800 will still be faster than a single FW400 drive, performance shouldn't suffer much at all since the drives are much faster than the interface.
 
As I'm just using the USB 2.0 external drive for back up, I'm not too fussed about quality. I've ordered one that's clearly Hong Kong-style but is located in Australia, so at least that may give me a bit of consumer protection. I'll post if anything goes wrong. I've had a pretty good run with Hong Kong products in the past, the only one that really went wrong was an underwater camera that I bought - the case was fine but the camera died out of nowhere.
 
Most FW400/800 enclosures are functionally the same and use similar Oxford bridge chipsets and reference board designs.

OWC's enclosures are built well and they're aesthetically pleasing. That's most of what you're paying for. OWC also has a pretty good track record for customer service, a huge reason they're regarded so highly in the Mac community.

I have a couple of their Mercury enclosures, along with some Vantecs I bought from Fry's. Not surprisingly, they all perform about the same with identical drives installed. The Vantecs aren't as pretty, but they were a bit cheaper.
 
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