G-Raid or ProMax DvBox or OWC for external drive

I'm looking at 500GB external firewire drives and have it narrowed down to two. I'm very new to this and have gained much of my limited knowledge from this forum as an observer, but I would like peoples opinion as to which one to buy and why. Thanks - chris

G-Raid $450 for 500GB
[www.g-technology.com]

ProMax $499 for 500GB
[promax.com]

OWC - $320 for 500GB
[eshop.macsales.com]



Post Edited (05-25-06 15:02)

condor...I own both fw800 drives and haven't had any problems with either. DVBox is slightly smaller

Nate

all 3 of those get good reports here on lafcp - id bet any of them will be fine.

here is my take on ANY large firewire drive or raid.

MAKE SURE IT HAS A FAN! drives get hot. multiple drives in a box get hotter. if it aint got a fan i wouldnt buy it.

1T OWC Mercury Elite-AL works like a dream for me.

may i suggest a SATA II drive,

hitachi makes a great drive esp for MAC. i believe you can a get a 500gb for just over $200(with out enclosure). + the small cost of a sata card (you can however find firewire and uSB2.0 enclosures that will allow you to get away with out one).

youll greatly decrease your chance of crashing and increase your transfer times tremendously.

I will tout G-Raid for as long as I live.

But an external SATA Raid or SATA Drive + SATA card will be faster. Depends on what you are editing. I can work all day long with DVCPRO HD on my two G-Raids.

Second the G-Raid endorsement -- I use 2 of the 1 terabyte (well close to it when you take away the headroom on drive) drives.....they are - as they say in New England - "wicked fast" for everything from HD on down..only use my old Firewire drives for project backup storage now.

G-RAID. I don't know about the others, but I own G-RAID. It handles my large Uncompressed 10-Bit files with ease as my main GFX drive.

GREAT Units.
GREAT Customer Support.

- Joey



Post Edited (05-26-06 05:46)

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

FYI - I ended up going with the OWC 600G. [eshop.macsales.com]

Cost was a major factor, but reputation was also key. While OWC isn't mentioned as much as G-Tech or ProMax I've yet to find anything negative about them. Anyway - you'll note that the 640G was cheaper than the 600G. They use different brand drives in the different configurations. The 640 had Western Digital, the 600G had Seagate, and the 500G had Hitachi - thought that was interesting. Anyway, thanks for all the feedback and the great forum.

-Chris
Mac/Editing Newb
20" IMAC, 2G, 2G RAM, FCS 5.1

Chris-

Just curious, I'm about to get either the OWC 800G or the G-raid 800G, did you like the Seagate better than the Western Digital? Is that why you chose the 600 over the 640?

The OWC 800gig also has a Seagate inside, and 32MB of Total Cache (I think the 600 has 16MB), which I am still unclear on in terms of what sort of speed increase it actually means. I noticed the graids only have 8MB...

Let me know how you like it,

Marla