What Firewire Drive Should I Get?

I need to replace a Lacie 250GB drive which I mistakenly bought on
Ebay which nulls any warranty. Bridge is bad. (found out after posting
here previously). Any suggestions as to which drive models will give
me reliable service with my 2.0 G5 Powermac running 10.3.9?
I'm not interested in the most bang for the buck, I'm interested in
purchasing a model (new) that is known to work consistently with
the type of equipment I have, without a lot of "issues". Reading your
comments would be very helpful to me. Also, any honest repair shop
suggestions for the Lacie in the LA area?
Thank you.

the ONLY company ive yet to read ANY negative comments on in this forum is promax.com.

ive owned a large number of their external firewire drives running on machines ranging from g3, g3 powerbook, g4, g4 powerbook and g5 - all running os's 9.2 up to 10.3.9 and ive had ZERO issues of ANY kind.

call them, ask for rene, tell him wayne from houston sent you

Thanks Wayne,
I went to their site and found a few different types of drives: The usual
400, 800 and RAID. What is RAID? And have you heard of a problem
with Firewire 800 with Oxford chips and the Mac - it seems I've been
reading a lot of these issues on the Forum.

what is a RAID? ha, ha, a good question. and the first answer is that if you have to ask, you probably dont need one.

as i recall, RAID is an acronym. back in the early 90's i was told it meant "redundant array of inexpensive drives" now i hear it means "reduntant array of independent discs" - either way, it is the process of taking multiple drives and addressing them such that you get either a significant boost in speed and/or reliability. and as you get into proper HD work, they become an absolute requirement... generally a raid is an external enclosure connected to your computer via some degree of pci card but you can set up an internal array with your internal hard drives as well (which seems to be a popular approach around here.

ive used the g-raids, and although happy with the perofrmance, for standard everyday DV work i didnt see any significant benefit to them over just the cheap fw400 promax drives. and my work more often than not involves very heavy compositing.

even the cheapest of the promax fw400 drives will be fine, i have two on my desktop right now and ive done national broadcast work on them with no problems.

There is another dividing line in The Great FireWire Drive Controversy. If you don't intend to use it for Live Video, it almost doesn't make any difference whose drive you use.

If you do all your production, capture and play back from a second internal drive or a proper RAID, you can archive everything else on just about anybody's FireWire drive. It's when people try to capture directly to a FireWire or play back from one that it can get sticky. Apple has never been comfortable with anyone doing this and they have said so many times on their web site.

A great many people get live video to work OK, but there's that stubborn 10% or so for which it just never works right. That would be us, by the way. I can tell immediately when somebody is trying to capture to a FireWire drive because I get the magic "Dropped Frames Phone Call."

So that's the real decision. There is a list of things to pay attention to to improve your chances while doing live video, or just go for unconditional stability and only use one for archive storage like we do.

Koz

Koz,
Thanks for your comments. As I'm new to non-linear, I was told to
capture and playback to an external drive, and just went with that
advice. And it's late for me to partition my internal now and wipe
everything away. So, what would be your suggestion as to the
least expensive way for "stability"? Would having a second drive
installed in the G5 void my warranty? And what exactly do I need to
do to get a RAID system going. I know I'm ignorant about this
stuff but trying to learn to get through the technological hurdles
so I can do what I love - edit!
Thank you.
Ray

Ray,

partitioning your one internal isnt really an option either.
you;re still capotureingto the system drive.

a second internal would be very stable and not void your warrantee.

i think the percentage who have problems with FW dirves is less than 10%, though.
i'm working at a film schoool at the moment.
all my students (6-10) have been given their own 500g drive for their projects, and none have had problems yet.

they were all given 500G LaCie drives.
(some here hate LaCie, but they work for me.)
i suggested the Medea G-Raid, which gets raves here, but the school had had a bad experience with Medea, and didnt want to know about them.

interestingly, both these drives have 2 250 gig drives inside them RAIDED together.
read up on RAID here:
[www.lafcpug.org]

cheers,
nick

Since I switched from Lacie to the G-RAID my dropped frame problems have decreased from 10% to 0%. I'd vouch for it any day.

G-RAID



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

<<<And it's late for me to partition my internal now and wipe
everything away.>>>

They're right. It's not a partitioning problem. The basic hard drive can only do so many things at once and only so fast. It's mechanical.

The proper solution is one hard drive for the operating system and programs and the second physical hard drive for live video. External Hard Drives can be used for archive and they can also be used for cutting. It doesn't matter if there is a frame drop or brief freeze on an external drive while you're editing, because none of that video is real. FCP "edits" by moving pointers, instructions, and lists around. None of it is actual video.

After you finish cutting, ask FCP to create a self-contained movie on your second internal drive and play it out from there. This will give you 100% reliability and many of us use this method.

If you're adventurous, you can certainly do a lot of this work directly to and from the FireWire drives, but the chances of error go up and there are now "rules" you need to follow that aren't there with the internal drives.

Many people use the Live FireWire Drive method and many, but not all, get away with it. If your captured show slowly drifts out of sound sync, for example, it could easily mean that FCP is gently dropping random video frames because the system can't keep up. Final Cut will not necessarily warn you that it's doing this.

One very highly recommended method to use a FireWire recorder (camcorder, etc) and a FireWire drive at the same time is to buy a FireWire card for your machine and split the devices--one on the card and one on the computer. That has an excellent track record and gives you very good stability.

RAID is just a way to combine two or more disks to do a job. There are many different RAID methods. You can combine two disks so each records part of the video, but twice as fast (I have a machine that does this). You can design a RAID so one disk constantly protects the other. You can combine RAID methods in one cabinet.

I have one machine that has four drives. 1 and 2 are fast and 3 and 4 are fast and 3/4 duplicate the work of 1/2 in case of failure.


One thing that External FireWire drives do is cause Video Forums to fill up.

Koz