MacBook Pro External Hard Drive Question

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The guy I spoke to at eurekapacific here in Sydney Australia, advised me that the CalDIGIT VR enclosure will do exactly what I'm after

I suggested that on March 16th in this thread. Took you long enough

The CalDigit FASTA-1ex SATA ExpressCard is the best choice because it is tested and configured to run best with their own products first (I have one of those too).

Put the Taurus out to pasture.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Hmmm sorry Joe must have missed it

Speed wise there as good as each other...?

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Speed wise there as good as each other...?

What is?

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I was talking the the expresscards, anyhow I've noticed the Sonnet is widely spoken about on forums, seems to be not much information about the CalDigit.

Look I couldn't agree more, getting the same brand expresscard makes perfect sense, it's that I've hit a wall with the Australian distributor after telling him I bought the CalDigit VR 4TB enclosure from B&H, he kind of got pissed and now refuses to sell me the CalDigit expresscard.

I'm currently in contact with another mob, so hopefully I can get the card through them.

Joe you'd probably do the same thing, B&H are selling the 4TB unit for $525, here in Australia the exact same unit was quoted $1,055. Even after adding insurance, paying for postage, I was still better off by $300.

Oh well, his loss...! When I need a drive in the future, I definitely won't be asking them.

Your Australian Distributor is a jerkwad. Sales are sales. Find another one or order online. I wouldn't pay Australian prices if I could get it all online cheaper (...and I do all my equipment shopping online - there's always a better price - and some places negotiate and throw in free shipping).

Anyway like I was saying earlier, I have been using my CalDigit VR via FW800 and I have no issues at all with ProRes footage. My Express34 card sits in it's static bag in my backpack.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

>Your Australian Distributor is a jerkwad

I'll second that for not getting his facts straight about what he's selling. That said, Caldigit is a nice drive unit. Very stable transfer speeds. Only issue is that when the drives eventually fail (nothing lasts forever), you need to get replacement modules from caldigit, instead of swapping them out with drives from a store. So you may want a module on standby in a couple of years.



www.strypesinpost.com

grafixjoe Wrote:
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Joe,

What codecs do you edit with via firewire 800? Thanks.

>
> Anyway like I was saying earlier, I have been
> using my CalDigit VR via FW800 and I have no
> issues at all with ProRes footage. My Express34
> card sits in it's static bag in my backpack.

Hard drives in an external enclosure are not as fast as internal hard drives. The reason is the bus they are connected to.

An internal hard drive, profits from the Gigabytes that can be transfered over the internal bus. The only "weakness" is the read/write speed of the hard drive itself.

If you put the same hard drive in an external enclosure then you have 2 additional devices in between:
- The bus from the computer to the enclosure (eSata, Firewire, USB, whatever...)
- The controller of the hard drive inside the external enclosure.

All these pieces of hardware can (and will) lower the actual speed of the hard drive.

When you scrub in ProRes, then a tremendous amount of data needs to be transmitted in bursts from the hard drive to the CPU. Every time you move the mouse, the software (FCP, Quicktime,...) needs to find a keyframe, read it and read all the frames that are in between the keyframe and the frame you want to see. This can add up to a lot of MB's that need to be read.

Remember that the speed of a hard drive is usually measured in MB per SECOND. If you "only" get 60 Mb / sec from the drive and the software needs to read 30 MB from the drive to decode the frame that you want to see, then you wind up with a waiting time of over 1/2 second for just one frame.