External Firewire Enclosures

Hi. I have been researching building an external firewire enclosure for some "light" editing (I am a producer who will be performing basic stringouts to get the story ready for the guys with the real talent- the editors, of course!)

I would love to hear some of the recommendations of the forum regulars about my plans.

Here is the situation:

My system is a 15" G4 powerbook 1.25 GHZ with 1 GB of RAM and 1 FW 800 port and 1 FW 400 port. I will be running Final Cut 5.0

We shoot on DVX100's and the Sony HDV Z1U.

I am thinking of buying two 400GB Seagate Paralell ATA drives 16 MB cache and 7200 RPM. These are Barracuda Drives.

I will place these two drives in an enclosure that has FW 800 ports. The media will be captured on a separate system and then dumped to this drive so I can do work from home and on the road.


Questions:

1) Should I RAID the two drives or should I just have them come up as separate 400 GB drives? From what I understand, RAID will make the disks faster, but also could become more of a liability if the disks crash- as the data is saved across 2 disks instead of one.

2) Does having 800 GB's in a single enclosure create more heat and, thus, should I get a particular type enclosure to handle the power?

3) Does anyone have any strong preferences on what enclosure to go for?

4) Also, I haven't heard of people doing this, but it appears there are a few companies that could make the following scenario happen:

Buy 2 SATA internal drives, place them in an enclosure with SATA ports and buy a PCIMIA card that has SATA ports.

This would be more expensive than going with PATA, but would it also add more speed? Or is it overkill? Is it even possible??

Any advice or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks and happy holidays.

i cant comment on the enclosures, other than to say that if you do want to put both derives in one enclosure, then i imagine it would have to be a special "2 drive" enclosure.
Makes sense.
It would generate more heat.
THe LAcie 500 drives i use have 2 x 250 Gig drives in them.
they DONT have a fan in them, and it is worrisome.
it's a hot summer here, and i've now got small fans directed at my drives.

anyway, the questions i CAN answer:

1) if you go with separate enclosures - Don't RAID.
You dont need the speed, and you dont need the increased risk & bother.
if you go with one enclosures - then, yes, RAID the drives.

4) again you dont need the speed of the external SATA solution.
FW400 would suffice, so your FW800s will be fine.

nick

If you really know what you're doing you could build a firewire raid enclosure or you could just buy one from G-Tech at about $1.10 per gb. They use the hitachi drives which are very reliable in a raid 0. Either way it's a good idea to get a PCMCIA card to run the drives on and then use the firewire bus for your camera or deck when capturing. I would probably go with a G-Tech SATA raid on the sata PCMCIA card.

[www.g-techinc.com]
[fwdepot.com]

Hi, my 2cents.
I am using a 4-drive enclosure with 200GB drives. It's not a SATA, it's a regular ATA firewire enclosure. Been using it for some time now and the results have been rewarding, well, no reward in transferring data, but I have not had any problems.
All of my drives are Hitachi and I am using a firewire hub to connect it to the back of my G5. It has 1 fan that is sufficient to cool the 4 drives, when I first bought it, I was constantly touching the surface, checking on the heat released, but it was not extremely hot, I don't want to say it was cool, I will say it was under an alarming heat index, good enough for me. When using more firewire devices, I was advised to use a hub.
Faster retrieval and delivery of data and quiet operation. Belkin has very reliable hubs, connectors and routers.
Good luck!

man, i say spare yourself the hassle and just buy a firewire 800 g-raid. it'll do everything you need...

you might save a few bucks building your own - but who do you yell at when things go haywire?

There is one really good reason to "build your own" Even the least of the fully assembled FW drives give you only 2 years of warranty but most are one year. While the actual drives are 3 year warranty and Seagates are 5 year.

Why purchase a drive inside the enclosure that gives you one year when buying the pieces give the enclosure one or to years and the drives 3 or 5 years.

Again, Firewire drives are simple -- one ATA disk drive - one enclosure with a 1394 to ATA bridge board and either an internal powersupply or one external powersupply. One Firewire cable and you have you own external drive.

Build your own! Other world computing has a great box for $129 it might be more for FW 800. When Mike gives me time I'm going to do a Show and Tell and make one in less then 15 minutes. Raid from Disk Utility it Fun and Gratifying.

ok, i CAN build my own FW drive box and save $100 - but WHY would i bother? (and i HAVE done it), im an artist, not a tech guy, i dont have time to muck about with hardware that dont HAVE TO. id rather produce product than sit and bolt seagate drives into oxford enclosures...

relationships are worth a lot to me. relationships with vendors who know my name, vendors who will replace my deck when something goes wrong with my order. relationships where when i need a drive at 10 AM on saturday, i can trust will get it shipped on time friday and delivered when i need it. even if i only have $300 order.

im a professional. i dont have time to dink about in the minutiae of technology. i need to know that my gear will work reliably when i need it without fail.

I would get this enclosure from FW800 enclosure from OWC:

[eshop.macsales.com]

Is is internally raid 0 for faster speed and your powerbook will see it as one large drive.

Some of us are Tech guys and artists Wayne some of us like to dink around as a way to take a break. Others don't that's cool. Some of like, if we have a problem knowing how to fix it without calling in someone else.

Thanks for all the advice so far. If I were to buy a pre-built drive, G-raid would be the way I'd go. It seems like everyone is very happy with going in that direction.

To get 800 GB worth of drive space from G-raid, though, it costs a pretty penny ($1100 after taxes).

From what I have gathered from the tech orientated gurus on these type of forums is that Seagate drives come with 5 year warranties and the Barracuda 400 GB 7200 RPM with 16 MB of cache are solid drives- and they will onlyl run me $175 each after rebates.

It sounds like there are solid "2 drive enclosures" with fans and mutiple firewire ports out there for around $125. So the total cost is right at $500 and you know what type of drives are used in the enclosure, where as some companies will use whatever they have their hands on at that point in time. I don't mind screwing a couple of things into place, etc.

This is almost 1/2 the price by building my own. If the G-raid were say $150 more, than yeah, I'd probably just go that way.

However, if people think building your own drive, with the safety of a 5 year warranty on the drive, will provide low-risk and high performance, than for me it appears the way to go. Yeah, I try to be professional, but that cuts both ways. If I can maximize my dollars and still receive a quality product, than it would seem foolish to not look into it, right? I can think of a lot of place the $500 could go.

At the same time, I don't want to be pennywise and pound foolish, so if anyone has had any serious headaches from building their own enclosures, I would love to hear about it before I make the move.

Otherwise, I will update you all on how the drive performs. And if I come back bitching and moaning because it didn't work, then I guess I'll have no one to blame but myself and it will be a lesson learned.

Thanks again for your time!

Hey Dean-

It would be super cool if you did a "tutorial" and anchored it somewhere. I'm sure it would help a lot of people who, like myself, are new at this- but are naturally inclined to "do it yourself" and want the chance to give it a shot.

I just did the best of both worlds:

one of the students at school was putting together a bulk order of drives.
i bought a couple through him,

i saved $100
he made $100.

cheers,
nick

I get no name enclosures for $30. Just Froogle it and make sure you've got:

A) FireWire
B) Oxford Bridge 911
C) Internal Fan
D) A nice Seagate or Hitachi drive.

You'll be good to go!
Cheap and works as well as any other FW Drive.



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