FW Drives Any Preference

Sorry I know this subject has been covered adnauseum here. I have a friend who wants to buy a 500G FW drive. I don't use FW drives so thought I would ask you guys what brand he should buy. From what I've gathered here he should stay away from Lacie.

Thanks
Joe

just do a subject search of the forum for "firewire drive"

- you'll find all you need WAY faster than waiting for us all to reply for the 17millionth time...

I enjoy the forums directness, from their advice we got a G RAID - happy as Larry but it has to be said, after numerous Lacie calamity's, the big disk extreme his holding it's own. However, the inputs etc on the G RAID look sturdy and twenty first century. I just got FCP 5.1 to work in all its glory so I feel like the man.

Thanks Wayne, did a search and got 10 pages of hits for firewire drive before I posted. None of the info I found was what I was looking for.

If you are in the USA, I would suggest you look at the FW drives offered by OWC (www.macsales.com). They are of sturdy construction, external power suppy and they use either Seagate or Hitachi/IBM drives inside. They also offer a two year warranty.

I have used their products several times and are completely happy with them.

My .02c

i cant believe that. as we have listed brands like 400 times.

the ONLY two brands of firewire drives that (to my recollection) have NEVER had bad posts on this forum are OWC and PROMAX.

to me, if you can collect 3 similar bad reviews on a product then its a non starter. though some have no problems with lacie and maxtor. i can pull about 10 similar problems with them on this forum.

you may have read that im a big supporter of promax products. as ive owned well over a dozen in the past 7 years with not a single problem to mention.

EVERY time that ive ventured away from my trusted promax drives, ive had problems. i even bought an iomega external FW drive last week (it was the only product the local vendor had that met my specs), and it wouldnt capture without dropping frames. so i ended up just using it as an archive volume...

if you didnt read it in the 10 pages you found:
promax, promax, promax, promax, promax, promax, promax, promax, promax, promax, promax, promax, promax, promax, promax, promax, promax, promax, promax, promax, promax, promax, promax,

Joe Brown wrote:

> Sorry I know this subject has been covered adnauseum here. I
> have a friend who wants to buy a 500G FW drive. I don't use FW
> drives so thought I would ask you guys what brand he should
> buy. From what I've gathered here he should stay away from
> Lacie.
>
> Thanks
> Joe


I would recommend OWC. Good tech support and reliability.

I know lots of people on this forum like G-Raid, but I've had to return several G-Raids recently. They would unmount and/or drop frames. The same footage played fine on a OWC drive. Apparently there's been a bad batch of G-Raid drives out there for several months (see G-Tech forum in Creative Cow).

If you want to buy G-Raid, buy from a place where you can easily return and/or exchange.

<<<500G FW drive>>>

Just a word on a problem that doesn't often come up. Around 200G or so the drive access and data speeds start to slow down. The larger the drive, the harder the Mac has to work and the longer it takes to record or play back stuff.

You may not be able to capture or play back from a drive that large, but there are ways around that. You can store information and clips there and you can edit, but something that large may not be stable enough for live video.

Something that does come up regularly is buying two; one to back up the other. How dead would you be if, in one year, that drive was full of your clips and valuable videos and it just stopped spinning.

They do that, and always at the worst times.

All your valuable stuff should exist on two different physical things (tape/drive. Drive-a/Drive-b, Drive/DVD, etc).

Koz

What about drive Towers, with perhaps up to 7 bays...

Not RAID, just a box of drives for access to the project, clips, backups, etc?

A drive Tower, rather than a counter top of external drives daisy chained together?



Independent photographer, film maker and Producer. In the wonderful UK.

i dont know that a "drive tower" as you describe it is any different than a stack of daisychained drives.

to my understanding, unless its set up as a RAID, its just a stack of drives with really short cables between them - wich doesnt really buy you any added value...

<<<unless its set up as a RAID>>>

That's what we did. LaCie stacks set up RAID5 where there is protection if one drive goes in the toilet.

About the same numbers, too. A 1T LaCie stack will give you 700G after the RAID configuration.

Koz

Just to throw my .02 in here...

I was going to get an external fw drive (I have a lacie fw800 now...but wanted to get something "safer", but got turned onto the external SATA drives.

I purchased an enclosure from OWC for around $80 that holds 2 drives...found 2 250GB drives on ebay for $120, and purchased a firmtek/seritek 4 port external sata card for $100...and now I have a 500GB raid array that runs around 130MBps flawlessly. I easilly handled 4 streams of 10bit uncompressed footage no problem.

I know, it's not totally "safer", but you can beat the price/speed for $300 anywhere!

Thanks, Dave -

That is more like what I want to accomplish.

Thank you for the details.

What cables did you use to get from the enclosure to the G5 firmtek/seritek 4 port external sata card , or am I missing a piece of the hardware configuration?



Independent photographer, film maker and Producer. In the wonderful UK.

If you order the enclosure from OWC, it comes with 2 cables. I think most enclosures come with the cables, and I'm fairly certain you can order everything from OWC, even the hard drives if you want.