Also, remember to format or convert your drive to NTFS when you get it, to avoid the 4GB file limitation of the FAT32 format.

If you buy an external USB drive, it will almost certainly come formatted for FAT32. I presume the same is probably true for internal drives?

For a while I used an external 160GB USB drive with no problems either capturing to it or editing with it. I eventually filled that up and bought a 500 GB internal.

Tim L

Most internal drives come unformatted and it's up to the person installing it to select a format. If you are using an OS that supports NTFS then that will be the default format for the new drive.

I use Western Digital "MyBook" external USB 2.0 drives, 500 GB each. (I have 3 of them, so I can make mirrors of my data for backup and off-siting). So far, so good - I experience no noticeable delays or issues capturing/editing/rendering video to the external drive. Easy plug-n-play too, so I can take all my video projects and videos elsewhere if I desire.

Thanks mickbadal.
Do you use these drives for archiving also? I was thinking of using dvd's for this type of storage.
Thanks again for your prompt reply.

Yes I do. Eventually when I have 500GB worth of data that I want to "put aside", I archive it on two drives (mirrors of each other). For the amount of data I'm dealing with here (> 100 GB), I find DVDs to be way too cumbersome.

The only drawback to the approach I stated (synch 3 drives) is that it lacks a "snapshot" of data - i.e. a copies of the data from a single point in time. The reason this is important is that files sometimes can become corrupted, as we all know, and if you don't know the file has become corrupt, then it doesn't matter if you have 1,2,3 or 100 drives - once you synch them all, that file is lost. With snapshots, you can go back in time and find a copy of the data before the corruption.

The easiest way to maintain a snapshot is to use a backup utility to capture full or incremental snapshots of all your data every week/month or so, and store those to another drive.

For what it's worth, I find a 160 GB external (Lacie portable) USB2 drive is very useful. If you put all of your media files (or copies of them) plus the project file (.vf) on the external drive, you can work on different computers. For example, I use a desktop at home and a laptop when travelling. It is a simple matter of just plugging the external drive in and the project runs perfectly, despite the drive having a different designation in each computer.
GBR

"If you put all of your media files (or copies of them) plus the project file (.vf) on the external drive, you can work on different computers."

Agreed, that's exactly what I do too. I often take my external along with my laptop to my parents' place up north, and work on video while looking at the lake - very cool!

Of course, I'm sold on WD MyBook over the Lacie's, due to their look n feel and auto shutdown features. But that's a matter of personal taste :)

BTW - Dealigg.com was just running a special on them, a 500GB for about $96!!!

Thanks for the link. Unfortunately it looks like their deal had expired. I will keep looking.
Do you think its worth spending the extra bucks to get the USB/Firewire version?
Thanks again and to all for your help with this subject.

I've never really used a firewire external HD off my PC, since my PC has two firewire ports but they seem to use the same interrupt. I had tried using my camcorder connected via firewire and an HD connected via firewire at the same time in the past, and the devices hung. So I stuck with USB 2.0 external HDs.

I haven't found any noticeable delay with using USB 2.0. I'm a bit hazy on the specs but I believe USB 2.0 might even be a bit faster than original firewire. Even if not, USB 2.0 has worked fine for me. And since (I think) the HD that offers the add'l firewire port is more money, I'd rather just buy the USB-only version anyway!

Yes, Firewire 400 and USB2 are close together in access time with Fw800 double 400 and eSATA currently way the fastest at maybe 4x FW800.

I also use 2 WD 'Premium' My Books 500GB ea. for the same reasons, backups and location editing with a HP nw8440 laptop. My MBs each have 1 USB2 port and 2 Firewire 400. They're all 7200rpm.

Currently they're all daisy chained via the FW 400 and I have no data access problems with SD video editing.

But I'm looking at HiDef editing and adding a third My Book. Fw 400 is the slowest data transfer rate and with 3 MB drives all even 1/2 full, I think FW 400 may be too slow for HiDef editing on a big video program. My HP laptop is only FW 400 so I'm limited to 400 on my system.

So I'm thinking of upgrading to a system with FW800 or even eSATA data access. If you're thinking of the My Books and bigger HiDef files, maybe take that into consideration.

It means more investment than my current My Book drives which are on sale, but IMO you won't have to eventually upgrade for HD or AVCHD video editing.

If it's not too late then it's worth mentioning that you should format the drive with a 64K block size for the most efficient transfer of data. This is because all video files are normally huge, and will benefit being read from or written to the disk in the largest possible chunks.



Andy.

Thanks Andy. Its not too late since I havent purchased a second hard drive yet. Is this format utility part of the second hard drive set up?
jdv