Recommendations on expanding HardDrive space

omar wrote on 5/11/2005, 6:59 AM
What specs would you guys recommend for an external hard drive I could use to store my filmaking footage and files? I'm running out of HD space ... Those .AVI files are killing me :)

Would you use an Internal or External?

Is there a major difference between firewire and USB 2.0. I'm assuming USB 1.0 is out of the question ...

Thanks in advance

Comments

farss wrote on 5/11/2005, 7:09 AM
Firewire seems to perform way better. Keep the USB for the widgets like keyboards and mouses.
Internal is the best way to go if you can manage it, it's cheaper and safer. Other choice is to fit a caddy into the PC so you can just swap drive in and out as needed. Caddies are very cheap, but get the good ones that have a fan or two in them, Lian Li RH58 is pretty good, I've got a pile of them and I've got a few firewire enclosures that I've also fitted with drive bays so I can plug the caddies into them as well.
Bob.
johnmeyer wrote on 5/11/2005, 7:19 AM
For backup and capturing, external Firewire works just fine. If you want to preview to external monitor via Firewire from video stored on a Firewire drive, you must apply the Microsoft XP patch for 1394 (there are separate ones for XP1 and XP2).

However, I don't have HDV yet, so I don't know whether Firewire can keep up with the data rate and still manage to do preview, etc.
jkrepner wrote on 5/11/2005, 7:25 AM
I concur with the internal drive if you can swing it. I've always tried to keep my video drive on a separate IDE controller. (I'm sure I'm over doing it, but hey???) Currently, I have a 160 GB IDE ATA/133 drive attached to a Highpoint PCI controller card. This way, I can keep the drive set to "master" and the mother board's built-in IDE controllers can deal with the system drive(s) and CD/DVD drive(s).

With that said; I've seen some cool external SATA solutions. Might be worth checking into since you'd get the same performance as you would with an internal drive. A quick Google came up with this:

http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/esata.htm
BillyBoy wrote on 5/11/2005, 10:13 AM
If your drive and system support USB 2.0 its actually a little faster than firewire. No problems here using my Seagate external. As with any external drive, if you decide to get one, practice good mounting and unmounting procedures to avoid "disappearing" drives or data loss problems.
DCV wrote on 5/11/2005, 10:22 AM
Internal versus external comes down to a question of portability. Do you need your projects to move between locations and/or machines? External drives are great for this. Internals are more compatable (and in some cases faster) but not as portable.

USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 are almost identical performance wise, but I'll also mention that CPU utilization is much higher for USB than for Firewire. This means the processor will have to spend more time moving file data around instead of rendering. Firewire 800 is faster than either of the above and almost identical to the performace of an internal drive.

If you don't really need the flexibility of externals you're better off sticking with an internal for now for reasons stated in previous posts related to Windows patches (sigh). You can always pick up an external enclosure down the line if you change your mind!

John