External hard drive recommendation

Lili wrote on 10/5/2006, 4:18 PM
Probably sounds like a dumb question, but just to be sure, can I capture directly to an external hard drive with V5?

I have a big project that will take several months of filming for a series of videos and I'd like to keep all the footage for it on a separate drive so that it won't use up most of the space on my internal hard drives. I'll have about 5 hours of video to capture in total.

Can anyone recommend a suitable hard drive that's not too expensive .? I was hoping to get one for under $100. (Cdn.) Thanks.

Comments

MohammeD T wrote on 10/5/2006, 5:58 PM
for 5 hours you could buy an internal drive that holds 80 GB for about 80 USD .. and buy an enclosure for it.. this is the cheapest way to go, enclosures are about 20 USD
bevross wrote on 10/5/2006, 6:01 PM
I think you'll get more for the money going the route of buying an external enclosure + hard drive (buy each separately). Well thought of enclosures include the AMS VENUS Enclosures. Western digital or Seagate harddrives. Go for a 160G at least -- hardly much more than an 80G these days & useful for also storing mpegs, DVD preps, etc.

Any way you can just fit another hard drive into the machine internally, though? I think capturing would work o.k. but once I tried to encode an avi I just left on the USB drive and it was still chunking away after 15 hours (& 50% done). I cancelled that, transferred to the hard disk and retried -- it then took 6 hours to render.

fldave wrote on 10/5/2006, 6:27 PM
I just bought an EIDE 250GB internal drive for $89 at Sam Club (US). External firewire enclosures are cheap.

I prefer to capture to an internal drive. One (actually several) less thing(s) to mess up.
BrianStanding wrote on 10/5/2006, 6:39 PM
Forget Firewire or USB. SATA is the only way to go for external drives. I was forever getting dropped frames while capturing, glitches or pauses in playback,disappearing drives and other weirdness using IEEE- 1394 and USB drives. Since I installed a SATA card in my old 2.8Ghz P4 laptop and a WD 250GB SATA drive, I haven't had a single problem.

New Egg has a bunch of inexpensive external enclosures that will do SATA, USB or Firewire.
Harold Brown wrote on 10/5/2006, 7:20 PM
I have captured with no dropped frames on both firewire and usb. Not that I would suggest doing it. I have WD and Seagate external drives. I don't have any luck at all with enclosures. They sometimes are not seen by my system.
Michael L wrote on 10/5/2006, 7:26 PM
Most of my video is captured to the external drives. I prefer USB seagate and western digital. A lot less expensive then they used to be and much more reliable.
jrazz wrote on 10/5/2006, 8:03 PM
Lili, I think you are going to get a lot of mixed answers on this one. I capture to externals exclusively as I set two drives via firewire 400- one for capture and one for editing on two seperate firewire pci cards. I do not experience dropouts or issues. I know some will dissagree with this but I like LaCie external drives. They are more expensive but I think well worth it. I own 2- one 500gig and one 80 gig that I have had since 2001 and it is still going strong. A feature I really like about them that I have yet to see with buying external enclosurs is that they shut off when you shut your system off. You do not have to switch them off seperately (this got me in trouble as I shut my system off and forgot to switch off one drive that was powered on a different outlet and it got hit by lightening and it set me back a lot of hours).
I also started using a system not long ago that each project will get its own project drive which when I am done, I will write the name of the project and the owner on the drive and store it away incase it is ever needed again- HDD's are so cheap now. So I buy one, stick it in an enclosure and do my thing. Once done, I pop it out and put in another one and start a new project and erase the captured material (I copy all media for the project to the labeled drive) from the other drive.

As for what others are saying, it really depends on your system and how you set your drives up (DMA). Anyways, I hope this helped.

j razz
Lili wrote on 10/6/2006, 4:44 AM
Wow - seems like I've a lot to consider.! I like J Razz set up and may try that.

Besides my program drive, I have 2 internal hard drives already. I may just get an extra external and use it to to store the project and associated media, rather than capture with it.

Thanks for all the great suggestions:-)
RalphM wrote on 10/6/2006, 7:31 AM
Lili,

Have not had trouble with dropped frames on either firewire or USB. Since you are not using this subject HD for live capture, that should not be an issue anyway.

The "Venus" model mentioned in a posting above seems like a very nice unit although I'm wondering what happens if the fan gives up (an integral part of the enclosure).

There is also an enclosure sold under the brand name of "Ultra". Works well although the fan died early. Relaced it with a better fan and is doing fine.

I'm not too enthused about the cheap enclosures without fans. They run very hot. I have two that I operate with a small utility fan blowing accross them which, while kludgey, does keep them cool.

One complete external unit that I bought at Micro Center (don't know if you have them in Canada) sold under the name of Buffalo (USB no fan but the enclosure appears to have good convection cooling). This turned out to include a 250G WD drive and the whole thing was made in Japan. $89 US after mail in rebate.

For a five hour project, I'd sure keep a backup.....
rs170a wrote on 10/6/2006, 7:46 AM
Lili, look at the Seagate Barracuda that Tiger Direct has on sale for $133 Cdn. (after $20 rebate). Seagates are very good drives and the enclosure has a built-in fan as well as both USB and firewire interfaces.

Mike
Laurence wrote on 10/6/2006, 9:01 AM
If you want to use an external drive, you don't even need an enclosure. I just ordered one of these:

http://www.usbgeek.com/prod_detail.php?prod_id=0190

My Toshiba laptop has a feature where you can replace the internal battery with an extra drive bay, and this will let me use the same laptop hard drive on both my desktop and laptop setups. I also end up backing up data to hard drive and don't want to buy separate enclosures for each drive.

They have variations on this theme here:

http://www.usbgeek.com/prod_list.php?cat_id=004&cat=USB%20Cable

The one with both IDE and SATA connections also looks very interesting:

http://www.usbgeek.com/prod_detail.php?prod_id=0383

Make sure you have a fan blowing down on the drive if you go this route.
pjrey wrote on 10/6/2006, 9:31 AM
make sure you take RPM into consideration! the fast the better! i would not go below 7200 RPM... and make sure its USB2.0 or firewire...
i have a 60GB external drive.. 7200rpm... it was more spendy, i got it through dell, its notebook drive.. 2.5in.. small, and gets all the power it needs from the USB port.. so no extra power is needed, no turning it on and off... boot up, its on,
i like it!

pj
Laurence wrote on 10/6/2006, 10:36 AM
This is probably a dumb question, but are external ethernet drives fast enough? There are a couple of them available these days (as well as enclosures where you mount your own drives). It would be nice to use one of these if possible because of how easy it would be to share footage among a couple of PCs.
farss wrote on 10/6/2006, 12:50 PM
Over 1G e/net, plenty fast enough.