Buy the Hitachi---put it in an enlcosure---(ADS is good).

G-RAID is the Pimp Daddy though, right?
Although I'm yet to personally own one...I've heard nothing but good things about it.

Actually, I got one very negative review from a guy in town here who bought one for use with his FCP digibeta system. He actually advised the Lacie instead. Weird.

My employer bought a bunch of Lacie Big Disks about a year ago. The support has been great. They've happily exchanged 3 or 4 (out of 4 or 5) that failed just after the warranty expired. They've all lasted just a little over a year.

Look, if they're in a RAID array then that doubles their chances of drive failure. And since the cases are sealed, you can't take the disks out of the cases to save your media without breaking the warranty.

Personally, if you're using a desktop system, I'd look for removable trays for it that'll run off of SATA. It'll be faster and much more reliable than firewire drives.

If you're working off a laptop then you'll need a firewire enclosure. In that case I'd still try to find one you could swap the sata drive trays in and out of.

Rob Mack

The major advantage G-Raids have over lacie is the cooling and air flow. Heat is the enemy of your drives performance. When they heat -up, throughput suffers and the drive can and will eventually fail. G-Raids do not overheat.

Note: This is true for your internal drives as well. Make sure you have plenty of airflow around them. Keep your cables neat so they do not block the air flow inside your case.

We've had tremandous success with G-Raids. Our customers love them and they do not come back. I can't say the same for Lacie. Their failure rate is significantly higher. Get a G-Raid (Link fixed)

Gary

Gary, that appears to be a dead link.

[edit] Somewhere along the way the "L" was left out of the URL. This link works!

An extremely important point. Even on ADS enclosures, I've found that my drives fare much better if I raise them up on drive rails to improve the airflow underneath the drive.

The thing about 1394 drives is that it seems like you get many more points of failure. Controller card, cable, bridge board, and then the drives themselves. On paper this is just one additional component (the bridge board), but it seems like people have more trouble with all of the above AND trouble with interactions between devices.

And then there's the uncertain state of the microsoft drivers. Are they a problem? Sometimes it seems so.

The combinations of possible problems are numerous. Of course you can't do without 1394 in a Vegas edit system. I'd recommend you keep it as simple and minimal as possible.

Rob Mack

Thank you everyone! I'll get one of the 400GB G-Drives for this project. I'm editing on a desktop computer, but I use my laptop for doing mpeg 2 test renders while I'm working on the desktop, so, firewire drives work well for this.

Rob suggested that I get an external SATA drive array with removable drives. I may do this in the future, but I was also considering something like the new (released in June) G-RAID PRO: http://www.g-technology.com/Products/pdf/G-RAID-Pro-Datasheet.pdf

OK, last question. It says that I need a 64 bit pci slot to get the firewire 800 speed. I'm assuming you can only have a 64 bit pci slot if you have one of the new amd or intel 64 bit processors yes?

Actually the 64 bit slot needed for FireWire800 cards is PCI-X, which most motherboards made over the past year and a half have.

The new bus is called PCI-e or PCI Express. This is for the new generation of graphics cards. So far I'm not aware of any PCI-e cards that are not for graphics, although these new motherboards have a PCIe 16x graphics slot and then 1 or more PCIe 1x or 2x slots.

Gary

Also take a look at the Seagate 400GB external. Supports either firewire or USB 2.0 comes with Bounce Back backup software, just push a button on the drive to backup. Simple, solid, easy.

I haven't used this for capture or PTT, but for general overall storage, backup and easy transport from PC to PC, its hard to beat.

Also spending extra money simply to have an external "name" case may not be a very wise choice. More expensive then a simpler solution, use the removeable drawer approach. No external power supply, drives you already have slip in and out and are portable that way.

dhill,

Congrats on the choice. It's definitely a good idea to go for the case with the better cooling.

I don't think I was totally clear about the SATA bit. What I was suggesting (more as an ideal setup for firewire) was to use a firewire enclosure big enough to accept removable trays that could also be inserted directly into a dock in the computer if you so desired. The idea is to have a very flexible setup that gives you a way out if/when firewire starts to fail you.

Preferably, the disc drives inside the firewire case would be SATA instead of PATA since SATA offers some hope of hot swapability.

In our case with the Lacie drives, we've been reluctant to crack the cases after the bridge boards fail and just install the drives in the computers-even though a Lacie support person suggested it.

Rob Mack

I would also never buy a lacie drive again. I bought a 500Gb lacie drive and after about 6 month one of the two discs was failing. I sent the drive in for repair as it was still under warranty. During this time, I bought a 1 terabyte drive from Lacie, where the fan was failing in about 1 month. I definately had enough. I took an old pc still available here, installed a secondary ide controller card with 2 additional ide connectors, and installed the 4 disks and a small disk to boot from in this machine. I installed linux on it and am running it as software RAID-5. The price to pay is that there are only +-750 Gbytes available for data... but one disk can fail without causing data loss. Samba is running on the linux machine and I am accessing the drives over ethernet. Actually it is a bit slower as I am using 100mbit, but if you use gigabit ethernet, it would even be faster than the firewire approach. This is now running since about 3 month without any problems. In the meantime, I received a call from the shop where I bought the 500Gb drive. They told me that they don't longer sell lacie due to enormous heat problems with those drives, and they gave me back the whole money I paid for the drive.

Of my four LaCie's, 3 have failed; two within warranty, one a month out of warranty. The last tech. I spoke with quoted a 2% failure rate. Clearly, that is not my experience. The first drive that failed within warranty they happily exchanged. The most recent "within warranty" (last week) they did no happily exchange. Apparently, they now only "happily exhange" within the first 30 days. After that, you must ship it back to Oregon at your own expense for repair or replacement. The 3rd drive that failed out of warranty they offered to do nothing about. "Bad luck", the tech. said.

I don't know who is better, but I definitely cannot recommend LaCie.

Spot's already chimed in on my experience with LaCie. Horrible, horrible stories. I've got a personal Porche drive that's performed beautifully however 8 out of 10 that I've purchased for the school I work at have failed with just a few hours of operation on them. LaCie's been great to replace but the 3 trusty ADS tanks have never let me down. Spoke with the G-Raid guys at NAB for a bit and am really impressed with the build of the drives. They run very cool. No direct experience with them though. The Seagate externals look really promising too like BB mentioned.

mike

Thanks Gary/Video Guys (about the pci slot/firewire 800 question). My desk top computer is pretty old so I'm sure it wouldn't work. I bought a house here in SoCal (prices are insane) and have a really expensive girlfriend, so, my new computer will have to wait until after summer! haha I did get the firewire 400/800 version, so, when I do get a new computer, then I can take advantage of the fw 800 speed. By the way, I ordered my drive from you yesterday. Why don't I have it yet!?

Rob, I thought you meant that I should get an external SATA Raid with SATA PCI adapter such as the G-SATA (http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-SATA.cfm) instead of a firewire raid such as the G-Raid Pro (http://www.g-technology.com/Products/pdf/G-RAID-Pro-Datasheet.pdf)
I misunderstood since I think you were speaking of the drive within the firewire enclosure. I guess the SATA Raid is over kill for me unless I dive into the HDV thing. I don't currently need 135 MB/sec data transfer rate for my "band on the road" type dvd's I make shot on mini-dv cams.

Thanks again. I don't know any of you, but I read these forums all the time to get most of my information. I'm sure I speak for all of us semi-amateurs in saying that you time is much appreciated.

Def. of semi-amateur: someone who doesn't know entirely what they're doing, but getting paid for it. haha

PS Why is everyone always yelling at BillyBoy?