External Hard Drives

Will external hard drives sustain a high enough data rate to be able to edit on them?

 

A firewire-connected external harddrive is a good thing, child. In time, you will learn the ways of the firewire-connected external harddrive, and become a mage of firewire-connected external harddrive as I have become.

 

Translation: yes. ALL of my video is stored on externals. I have a 250 GB with rapidly decreasing space and a 160 daisy-chained off of it with some space still left. Firewire is your friend.

 

Firewire or USB 2.0 should be fast enough for what you need. If you have a computer bought in the last year or so you'll definitely have at least one of these ports.

 

You can not sit at the helm of a USB-connected external harddrive and declare unto yourself the status of mage.

 

Between my two connected computers, I have over a Terabyte of internal storage. There are several 150's, 200's and 250 Gb drives, all IDE.

 

so whats the different in speed to the average firewire connected drive?

 

Though USB 2.0 is rated at a higher throughput speed, FireWire delivered faster performance on external hard drives when connected to a desktop.

Source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,844061,00.asp

Question: Which is faster Hi-Speed USB 2.0 or FireWire?
Answer: In sustained throughput FireWire is faster than USB 2.0.

Question: If Hi-Speed USB 2.0 is a 480 Mbps interface and FireWire is a 400 Mbps interface, how can FireWire be faster?
Answer: Differences in the architecture of the two interfaces have a huge impact on the sustained throughput.


Read and write tests to the same IDE hard drive connected using FireWire and then Hi-Speed USB 2.0 show:

Read Test:
* 5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 33% faster than USB 2.0
* 160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 70% faster than USB 2.0
Write Test:
* 5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 16% faster than USB 2.0
* 160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 48% faster than USB 2.0


Source: http://www.usb-ware.com/firewire-vs-usb.htm

 

Yeah, I was going to warn against USB 2.0, but I didn't want to do the research and I had a class coming up so I didn't have the time to explain it. Thanks, odj.

I have almost half a terabyte. 80, 160, and 250.

 

I've got a USB 2.0 external unit but only use that for archiving on my collection of old hard drives...

 

I'm using a 300GB external hard drive and it works fine. I don't really see a difference. If you have a lot of RAM and a good processor, external hard drives are good especially if you have a lot of footage to edit and you don't have the room your hard drive.

 

A bigger effect on the effectiveness of a drive whole editing is this: drive speed. Nowadays, most drives that you buy have the drive speed to be able to work with MiniDV fairly well.

*checks his stats*

7200 RPM on both of my drives. Acomdata FireWire/USB 2.0.

 

I sometimes use my mp3 player(20gb) to edit on! by usb2

 

Now I must say I've never heard of that before. Is the storage solid-state or an actual drive?

 

I have one like that. It's pretty much a large flash drive that can play the music that's being stored on it.

 

Yea for me these external hard drives has been a real lifesaver for me to put my extra footage on. Ive got a 120GB drive and im thinking of getting another. Ive got about 30GB still on my PC hard drive, just enough to hold new footage, then I transfer it out over to the external drive. I would advise anyone in the movie business and does alot of filming and stuff to get one. They are indeed handy!

 

I would avoid USB 2 for video editing. I have 5 firewire hard drives connected to my computer right now. I also have 4 internal ATA drives.
80 GB int
40 GB int
120 GB int
200 GB int
120 GB ext
120 GB ext
200 GB ext
500 GB ext
500 GB ext

Total: 1.88 TB

I only have 487 GB available

I did have to add two PCI 2-port firewire cards to my computer. Once I hit over 4 external firewire drives my computers 2 built-in firewire ports started acting a little funny. I had my camera into one port and the 4 externals daisy-chained into the other. It was too much for the one port.

 

I use 200gig FireWire 800 External Drives, blazing fast and never had any issues with them, Lacie drives to be specific.

 

I have a total of 355Gigs and 300 of them are out side firewire, works great!...Stay away from USB like a Jedi would the dark side...

Mark