External Hard Drive

Following some advice receieved on this forum, and from a few other sources, I've recently bought a Sony HC3 camera and a Light and Motion housing.

I've got Sony Vegas Movie Studio 6 (Platinum) and I've had a go at editing some footage with reasonable results.

One thing I'm seeing is the size of the Intermediate files I'm using for editing (using the Cineform codec) which is stretching the hard drive on my PC a bit.

I've currently got an 80GB gard drive and I'm wondering about adding another hard drive (300GB plus) so that I can keep the operating sofrtware on one and the video files on another.

I wondered whether an external hard drive (USB2) would be any good for this. I could fit an internal drive but the externbal offers me flexibility to use it for other things on my other computer (the one I don't use for video).

What are peoples thoughts / experiences of using an external hard drive for this purpose

Any and all advice appreciated

I would buy a lacie-product. I am using a bigger disk extreme as an external backup drive. (1,2 tera). It has FW800, FW400, USB2 port. Via firewire 800 you can get about 78 MB/sec transfer, which is far more than neeeded for HDV.

Jules

USB2 (and USB1.1) use the CPU to move data.

Look at:

-Firewire (1394, iLink) 400Mbit/s or 800Mbit/s

-external SATA (Serial ATA) for xfer speed faster than firewire.

-internal SATA

Note: if you need very high xfer speeds, you'll probably have to use a two(or more)-drive RAID-0 array. You can run in to drive transfer speed limitations using a single drive.

If you're using a portable, you can get PCCard Cardbus adapters to connect Firewire and external SATA drives to your computer. (many portables also have firewire built-in; it looks like ExpressBus 34 eSATA adapters are available also)

If you have room in your desktop, go with an internal SATA drive (even if you have to add a SATA card to support it). fast, simple, inexpensive. (or you could do external SATA, a little more expensive: drive enclosure, external SATA cable, SATA adapter card)

It really depends on what kind of flexibility you need from an external drive.

I use a Seagate 400GB USB/Firewire on a Dell 9100 laptop and tried both the USB and Firewire connections and not really noticed much difference. I'm not doing video, so perhaps I haven't stressed the cpu.

One thing I find annoying about this external drive, and maybe it's only this one, is that it spins down after a short period of inactivity and take a few seconds to restart.

Is there a way to modify the drives sleep settings in Windows or is it drive dependent?

I've had nothing but good fortune with my 4 lacie externals of 120, 200 and 320. I have heard that the Lacies over 500 can be problematic. Just make sure it is a firewire external and spins at 7200.

Steve

A couple of odds and ends to keep in mind. First, the larger the drive, the more heat it generates. Buy an external housing that is vented and the bigger the better (more air to keep it cool). I just had the unbelievable misfortune of losing my hard drive and my backup drive all within a month. That along with some laziness on my part led to losing 4 dives worth of pictures not to mention family photos. I now have a backup USB and a backup to the backup!

My first backup USB drive was a small footprint case and I noticed immediately that the drive got a little bit warmer than normal. I thought nothing about it until my main crashed. Because I had a complete image on my backup USB, I ignored restoring the main drive and just reformatted and moved on with life knowing I was going to buy yet another USB in a few weeks to backup the backup. Well during the installation of the new drive I shut off the old before I backed up to the new...dumb....dumb....dumb. Drive never came back and I lost everything I hadn't saved to DVD.

Lesson Learned. I like USB but they burn a little hotter than internal drives hence may not last as long. Buy 2 if you can.

Semi-Mobile Ext Drive:

FirmTeK SeriTek/2ENSM2 SATA II Bundle

-Enclosure, Cards, Cables - $279++

-2 Hitachi 500GB SATA II Drives (1 Terabyte) - $250++

Total = $550

Screaming fast SATA II in Striped Raid Zero drives deliver read/write speeds faster than you internal hard drive and provide 1 Terabyte of storage.

http://firmtek.stores.yahoo.net/sata2ensm2.html

Mobile:

LaCe Little Big Disc

320 Gig, 5400rpm Dual Hard drive and cables =$399

Firewire 800/400, USB 2.0 in dual drive enclosure in Raid Zero delivers up to 82MB/s speed. Bus powered and wall powered, ultra portable, very well constructed.

http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=10723

I have both. Use FirmTek at home and travel with LaCie on trips. Love em both

Thanks everyone

To summarise what I think is the advice I'm getting here

External via USB is probably not a good way to go

External via Firewire is good (I guess I'd need to get another firewire card as I'd need to existing one for the Camera)

External via SATA is good (I'd need to get an external SATA card)

or Internal which limits it's use to one PC.

I think I'll have a look at the prices of the externals and necessary cards and then decide if it makes sense to go this route or whether to just stick a 320 GB internal drive in the PC

Cheers

I'm looking at a external 1tb network drive, then mirror the drives. Being Ethernet my other computer can access the drives

Western Digital 1 TB

New Eggs price

Not really portable, but buy.com has a good deal ($289) on a 1TB USB2 external setup (I think there are 2x 500gb drives in there):

http://www.buy.com/prod/Fantom_Drives_G_Fo...html?adid=17662

Maybe not fast enough for your needs, but may help others

Cheers

James

I'm looking at a external 1tb network drive, then mirror the drives. Being Ethernet my other computer can access the drives

 

Western Digital 1 TB

 

New Eggs price

Been very happy with my Western Digital Mybook 500Gb drive and it's done great service. However the guys on the Coolness Roundup podcast reviewed the 1tb version and they said it was very noisy. Maybe you could check one out in a quiet shop before purchasing.