OT: firewire drive question for hardware gurus

slacy wrote on 4/30/2005, 6:42 PM

Hi all,

I'm getting ready to upgrade my a/v storage setup. I've been using a variety of external USB drives, but I've outgrown this setup for reasons to numerous to mention here. I'd like to move to a system where I have a firewire tower with removeable trays that I could occasionally swap into a mobile firewire enclosure for remote editing.

Three questions.

1. What's the deal with hard drive sizes? I guess one has a choice of 2.5-inch, 3.5-inch, or 5.25-inch. It seems the industry is moving toward the smaller drive format for reasons of size, noise, and heat, but I'm curious how--or if--the needs of the A/V professional might favor one size of drive over the other.

2. Are there any do's and don'ts when buying multi-bay firewire enclosures? I'd like to get a quad-bay enclosure, fill it with four big drives (maybe 400 mb). I'm looking at the SATA-firewire enclosures right now. Is that a mature technology? Does SATA make sense in a Firewire 800 enclosure? Can anyone provide any links to primers on the various choices? I'm fairly technical in general, but when I see all the different flavors of ATA, SATA, SCSI, etc, my eyes start to blur a bit.

3. How would four different drives in a firewire enclosure show up in windows? As four logical drives? Or are they automatically striped together?

I realize these are somewhat dumb questions. But I know just little enough that I'm not even sure what questions to ask. Any insight is much appreciated.

Scott

Comments

farss wrote on 4/30/2005, 6:53 PM

1) 3.5 inch is pretty much what you'd want to go with. I haven't seen a 5.25" HD in years nor an 8" either. 2.5" is just for laptops, typically only 5400 RPM.

2) Yes, SATA makes sense in a 4 bay enclosure, you can stripe them in RAID and use f/wire 800 for a bit more get up and go. SCSI is expensive and only needed if you want to step up to HD and in that case f/wire is too slow, need to think fibre and then things get real expensive.

3) If they're striped then Wondoz sees only one drive normally.

We use lots of drives in single 1394 enclosures but mount the drives in caddies and fit matching bays into the 1394 boxes. Then we can also plug the drives directly into our big PCs for extra speed and to save desk space. Makes life much easier, on drive per client / job. At times I have the wife capturing with a laptop while I edit on the big machine, at the end of the day we swap disks around, very efficient although with Gigabit ethernet we could avoid the physical swapping around, just that only one machine currently has a GB port.

Bob.

slacy wrote on 4/30/2005, 8:41 PM

Thanks for the informative response, Bob. Couple of quick follow-ups:

1. Are drive bays generally interchangeable (aesthetics aside)? Or are you best served sticking to one family of enclosures and bays?

2. Do you stripe the drives with Windows or does the Firewire enclosure come with some sort of controller? This is probably a stupid question, but I just haven't dealt with firewire drives before.