I heard that Seagate was offering a five year warranty, worth looking into since Seagate is a good brand

so the IDE is better? What is the SATA drive?

Do most hard drives need an external case to put it in? i tought it went on one of the bays?

Sorry I need some help deciding. I want to save as much as possible. Thanks.

MAC

Hard drives come in several different types and lots of different sizes. The IDE interface is the traditional one used by PCs for the past decade or more and uses those thick ribbon cables to connect to the motherboard. The new SATA drives cost generally a bit more but use skinny cables. Both are fine.

You can put the drive in your PC box into a spare slot, and hook it up to your motherboard via the IDE cable or a SATA cable. Of course, your motherboard has to support the cable type.

If your motherboard has used up all its IDE or SATA connections, you can buy a cheap plug-in card that has additional connections for additional drives.

If you decide to go external, you need to put the bare drive in an empty drive box, which will contain cables to hook up to the drive connectors inside, and then in turn hooks up to your PC with either a firewire or USB2 cable. That works fine, too.

So you can see there is a lot of flexibility when it comes to PCs and hard drives. Cheapest route will be a 200GB bare drive ($100) with an IDE interface that you can hopefully connect to an available ribbon connector inside your PC. Since most motherboards have (had) 2 IDE ports, and each cable has two connectors (1 master and 1 slave device), that means 4 devices for the typical motherboard. If you have just three currently (say, a DVD burner, a CD-ROM drive, and a hard drive) then you just install the new drive onto the available connector. Worst case, you buy a cheapo card for $20 that provides additional connections.

I’m considering buying a new external HD, with both USB 2 and Firewire 800 connection. (Maxtor OneTouch II Firewire 800 / USB2.0 200GB 8MB 7200RPM.) My problem: is there any problem connecting a Firewire 800 HD to my “standard” Firewire port?

Joran

How much power should I use, the pc came with a 300watt power supply, will I have to put a bigger one to cover the extra hard drive?

MAC

All good questions, but you don't need to fret so much. Just get an internal IDE drive, plug it in (either as a slave to your existing drive, or as a master or slave on the secondary IDE cable). Your 300 Watt power supply will be perfectly adequate.

You don't need SATA or anything fancy if you are dealing primarily with DV video. If, however, the word "uncompressed" is in your capture vocabulary, or if you are doing some fairly fancy things with HD, then you may need something fancier. However, for DV, any garden variety, cheap, IDE drive will do.

Try to get one that has 7200 rpm and at least a 8 MByte buffer (although it will be tough to find one that has less than this).

If you are cheap, go to www.dealnews.com and look at the deals they turn up for IDE drives. I've purchased four drives in the past three weeks, and have paid no more than $40 (including shipping and tax) for any of them. This includes two 120 GByte drives and one 160 GByte drive.

If you really need an external drive, as your original post stated, then simply purchase an external enclosure from Meritline or Dealsonic (they usually have USB 2.0 enclosures for about $25 and Firewire/1394 enclosures for about $35), pop in your new drive and away you go. This is what I've been doing, and so for $65-$75, I've got myself a brand new external hard drive.

Thanks johnmeyer, That makes it clear now. Thanks all for your advise.

It's good to know you have some good back up help here.

I really appreciate the help.

MAC

Given that you are using a laptop, I'd get an external 2.5" USB2.0 case and fit it with a 80GB or so 'Notebook' 2.5" drive.

The case should be less than $20 for a USB2.0 only one. $35 for firewire as well.

If your Vaio supports USB2 I'd really not bother with the firewire interface.

The USB interface also has the advantage that it powers the external drive.

If you go for one of the 'standard' size drive caddies you need external power.

The disadvantage of the 2.5" route is that they cost a bit more and aren't quite as fast, so it's a bit of a convenience vs performance question.

A 120GB 3.5" 7200rpm drive is around $100, whilst a 80GB 2.5" 5400rpm drive is around $150...

I just had a 300GB Maxtor one touch II die on me (not the 800), it was 4 months old, Maxtor quickly replaced it, but I did not have it backed up and lost alot of hours of editting. I had another Maxtor DV3000 die a while back. I will not be buying another Maxtor drive. Recently I took advantage of a 5 year warantee seagate 200GB rebate for $70. and bought a USB2 FW enclosure from comp USA. Also my Maxtor one touch II and another Maxtor One Touch are not compatible when daisey chained. I have read about the problem before.

I have have all Maxtor internal IDE drives (10 each) running and I haven't had a single problem. I have heard of issues with the external drives though.

Maxtor has been very, very good to me... :)

Jordan , you can Plug a 800Firewire Hard Drive to a 400 Firewire port with no problems , you only need the appropriate cable(9pin to 6/4pin) , note that you wont get full advantage of the fast transfer speed , so it will work as a 400 unit ..

goodluck

I have 8 maxtor 300 gig externals all firewired in.. hopefully none will die on me... I'm keeping backups of most of the smaller sub 4gig avis etc on DVD though for backups, all files... just in case...

any stories good/bad re maxtor 300 gig externals? so far I haven't had any problems, but I don't want to lose any edits or source video...


ken

Ken, are you mixing (daisey chaining) both one touch I's and II's? My one touch I has being working fine for quite a while, I just can't daisey chain it to my II, so I use USB2 on one and FW on the other.

It was ironic that when I was at compUSA to pick up an enlcosure right after my Onetouch II died, I over heard a woman say to her friend "stay away from that", she was pointing at the 300GB one touch II.

I will say this, there was one occasion where I took the One Touch II to a clients home, maybe it got bumped, but it died over a month later.

here is a bad review:
http://reviews.cnet.com/4864-3186_7-31121421.html?messageSiteID=7&messageID=1188002&cval=1188002&ctype=msgid

Edited: I meant Hello (not Hell)

When we are talking about external hard drives: What are you’re recommendations about the ”best” back-up program? Or, which backup program do you use, and how satisfied are you with the on you use?

Joran

What are you’re recommendations about the ”best” back-up program?

I just removed what I previously wrote. It was only posted for about twenty minutes, but I realized that I had recommended a product which I had not personally used and therefore might actually not be a good product.

"Jordan , you can Plug a 800Firewire Hard Drive to a 400 Firewire port with no problems , you only need the appropriate cable(9pin to 6/4pin) , note that you wont get full advantage of the fast transfer speed , so it will work as a 400 unit .."

You won't see any performance difference since the IDE interface spec is 100 Mbit/sec.

About back-up programs. Most of the Maxtor external drives come with a program called Retrospect. It's a great little back up program for stand-alone systems or systems on a peer-to-peer network. It does not allow backup on a client/server system. You can easily create a script to back-up only certain data and set up a schedule for it to run. It allows incremental backups or even duplicates.

Here's a catch though. If you are buying an external drive to store your video data, then the question comes as to where are you going to back that data up??? So seems to me in that situation you need to have second external backup drive.

Anyway, I use Retrospect myself. Great program. I have clients on peer-to-peer networks that schedule their backups in the evening time. Helps give a little peace of mind.

Jeff, thanks... they're all the new touch IIs I think... concerned that they only offer a 1 yr guarantee... so I'll use them, but backup .. which is a hassle, especially with non-DVDable 12 gig avi files ...

tried backing up my boot hd with acronis this am and it doesn't work, seems to mess up the MBR settings... I'd used it before... backing up, I've been trying to get this stuff done for 9 hours now, since 3am my time.. major pita...

is there any really good incremental backup program( other than acronis), that I could use to just burn stuff to DVDs?

I'm thinking of getting a dual-density one too, so more capacity, though media's a lot more costly i think...

ideas? appreciate it..

ken

n19093:

Just a minor correction--the typical IDE interface spec is for 100 megabytes per second, not megabits. Also, I love your handle--a lot more creative than my boring old "riredale."

I also use Retrospect and it automatically backs up my C drive every morning at 3am (I'm usually not at the keyboard at that time). As for backing up video stuff, I back up my veg files and handcrafted clips, but I don't back up the "raw" video clips. I figure in a worst case I can always replace the raw video from my miniDV tapes. It's the veg files that hold all my intellectual output, such as it is.