OT: Hitachi announces 400/500GB Laptop drives

Cliff Etzel wrote on 1/4/2008, 10:05 AM
Looks like mobile video editing is going to get a whole lot sweeter.

Macworld's website says Hitachi has announced 400 & 500GB 2.5 inch laptop drives being available Feb 2008.

My current external desktop size drives are beginning to look & feel heavy in relation to the idea of a couple of these in enclosures to travel with. 1TB hard drive storage that can be put in a coat pocket - that's very cool. Now to see who will come out with an enclosure to fit these bad boys since they are 12.5mm in height as comapred to 9mm for standard laptop drives.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt

Comments

rmack350 wrote on 1/4/2008, 11:28 AM
In addition to single-drive enclosures, you could conceivably have dual drive RAID enclosures that run off a single eSATA cable.

I carry 2.5" drives in USB cases to and from work every day. They're supposed to be a lot more resistant to shock and vibe troubles, in addition to being just plain lighter.

Rob Mack
Cliff Etzel wrote on 1/4/2008, 11:32 AM
Imagine a 1TB RAID 0 the size of a small book.. LOL

Now if the Solid State Drives would only get this big and come down in price.. ;-)

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt
rmack350 wrote on 1/4/2008, 11:46 AM
My employers recently went down to the Galapagos islands for a month to shoot. They choose a tape-based DVCProHD camera because they felt that tape was going to be a lot more stable and hassle free that trying to backup P2 cards. Maybe these high capacity 2.5" drives might have changed their minds.

Or not. I think it would have taken a pretty well tuned system to make them choose P2 cards over tape for such a long shoot.

Rob
Cliff Etzel wrote on 1/4/2008, 12:00 PM
You'd need to make sure they were reliable and have a decent laptop for ingest and transfer. There are already 320GB Laptop drives and even 250GB PATA drives so the capcities are slowly increasing, although I really would like to see larger sizes for PATA since alot of enclosures still utilize that connection method.

I've still found USB connections to be the most reliable for connecting external HD's to a laptop - the PCMCIA slot on my Dell D400 more or less is useless - it drops all connectivity with both my firewire card and the recent eSata card I got - I figure a small 4 port USB hub with a single or pair of laptop drives for editing and I'll have a nice compact setup for laptop editing with Vegas Pro 8 using Gearshift, Sound Forge 9, Acid Pro 4 and Cinescore.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt
rmack350 wrote on 1/4/2008, 1:12 PM
I've been using PCMCIA cards for quite a long time for firewire, USB 2.0, SCSI, but not for ESATA. For Firewire, I went through 8 or 10 manufacturers before finding one that worked, but that was the case with all firewire devices at that time in 2002-ish.

Generally it's always worked very well.

If I ever get another laptop I'll choose expresscard over PCMCIA, and I suspect eSATA mightwork better with that. For that matter, by that time eSATA might be very common on laptops.

I agree that USB is very reliable, but you feel it's lack of speed when you have to transfer lots of data.

Rob
Cliff Etzel wrote on 1/4/2008, 3:19 PM
With regards to the PCMCIA card - which one did you finally find that worked?

I have a firewire enclosure for laptop drives and can't use it with the PCMCIA firewire card to ingest footage onto. I don't want to have to jump through that many hoops to find a card that works - any suggestions on which brands are reliable?

With regards to USB - Do you think it is sufficient to ingest and edit HDV footage with Vegas Pro and Gearshift or should I be looking at external Firewire/eSata?

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt