Using an External Hard Drive for Clips?
  • aletheia
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    Using an External Hard Drive for Clips?

    by aletheia » Tue Nov 10, 2009 8:22 am

    Hi there,

    In terms of performance, I'm wondering if it would be better to have all my footage on an external hard drive (I have the G-tech Q Drive hooked up via Firewire 800), rather than keep it on the hard drive in my computer? I have a 2.4ghz Macbook Pro with 4gb of ram, intel core 2 duo, with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics card. Would Modul8 perform better this way? Any thoughts/experiences?


    Thanks so much :)


    ps. I did a search to see if this question had already been answered... but couldn't find anything. Let me know if this has already been discussed.
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    The Midi Thief
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    by The Midi Thief » Tue Nov 10, 2009 10:06 am

    It's also depending on how fast your drives are. First of all your external drive has to be 7200 RPM or faster to make use of the faster Firewire 800 port. But if your internal drive is 7200 RPM it might be event faster than the external since it doesn't go through the Firewire interface.

    I'd say: If your internal drive is 7200 rpm and you have enough free space after copying your footage to the internal (at least 3GB to give the system enough space to work) I'd go with this solution.

    If your internal drive is 5400 rpm and your external is 7200 rpm, the go with the external drive.

    If both of your drives are 5400 rpm, buy a new external 7200 rpm FW 800 drive.

    We have been discussing flash drives, raid and eSata too. It think I remember that the flash drives are still pretty expensive. And the increase in speed with a eSata over the PCMCIA card slot on a MPB isn't that huge increase in speed and you can't run them on the newer MPB 15" Unibody since they don't have PCMCIA slot any more. A raid solution is faster but probably expensive. Somebody else has to explain about raid. And talking about eSata, flash drives and raid in the same breath is mixing apples and pears.
  • te-c
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    by te-c » Tue Nov 10, 2009 10:30 am

    My internal and external drives are both 7200 rpm so I've checked the speed of both with a benchmark programm and I saw that the external drive over firewire 800 was a little bit faster. You can download the programm on http://www.xbench.com/
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    The Midi Thief
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    by The Midi Thief » Tue Nov 10, 2009 10:34 am

    Right on! Stick with the external then? I will download the program and do some tests too! Cheers!
  • te-c
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    by te-c » Tue Nov 10, 2009 11:05 am

    I work only with my external drive, but I have mirrored my footage on both. If there is something wrong with external drive I can switch to the footage on my internal drive.
  • Vibber
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    by Vibber » Tue Nov 10, 2009 12:25 pm

    This sounds like a good option:

    http://www.lafcpug.org/reviews/review_graid.html

    This external 2 drive raid with Firewire800 connection seems to be way faster than an internal 7200rpm drive.
    Only thing missing from the test is if it would perform even better with an eSata express card.
  • te-c
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    by te-c » Tue Nov 10, 2009 12:54 pm

    This test ist 2 years old and somebody tells me that the harddrives would be better and better the last years, don't know if it is a good reference.

    My harddrive cost only the half of the g-raid, and I'm still glad with my lacie. Maybe the next can be a g-raid, but before are many other things to buy.
  • Vibber
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    by Vibber » Tue Nov 10, 2009 12:59 pm

    OK, point taken :)

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