firewire drives ?

I need to buy a new firewire drive 500 GB to run as second mediad drive on FCP . Is anynone familiar with the fin detail of Lacie models - Whats the difference ? Apple Store have a D2 hard drive extreme for £269 and then have a big disk extreme at £ 239 - Anyone know the respective model numbers and what the difference is ?
(I know people have mixed feelings abot Lacie - but needs must - budget bust and all that.... )

Do a search of this forum. We discuss this daily.

What's a £ anyway? Dude, this is LA. We don't understand your weird money, why you drive on the wrong side of the road, spell color with a "U", and-and then there's that PAL thingy. ;-)



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Firewire 800 drives are cool and most of the D2 designs have a triple interface-- 400, 800, and USB 2.0-- which you don't use for media disks; USB slow or high is just not made for time-based media.

However, I purposely avoid "Big Disks" because if/when they go south you have Big Delays. At the moment, for DVCAM work, I have three 160 GB D2's, going into two host adapter cards. I have many more stored on the shelf for various clients, like library books. They store upright in these neat metal standplates. Hooked up, they are segregated from the main FireWire bus on my Dual 800 G4 (yup, still chugging along). The main FW bus handles only the deck, which I control through RS 422-- it seems a bit crisper.

But don't use FireWire for anything other than DV25 work. Get yourself some kind of SATA Raid setup for uncompressed DVCPro 50, 100 or HDCAM.

- Loren
Today's FCP 5 keytip:
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I edit DVCPRO HD all day long with FW800 G-Raids...not one problem.

Raid, yes, but not individual disks you can break apart and store.

Still think SATA's a better idea. FireWire can be awfully funky.

(And I'm a big FireWire fan.)

- Loren
Today's FCP 5 keytip:
Preview effects sections with Option-P or Option-Backslash!

The FCP 5 KeyGuide?: a professional placemat.
Now available at KeyGuide Central:
www.neotrondesign.com

I ran some tests running Pro Soft eng disk tests and my Lacie 250 Sata single disk scored better then my Firewire 800 Raid 0 Box in most tests.