Back to the subject of drives.....

EX1 - Mackbook Pro/ 4 or 5 bay enclosure (probably Firmtek or Sonnet)

It just occured to me that when you come back from a shoot.... you are
going to want to dump the cards to a drive. For me I would want the
footage to go to the external SATA drives straight away. The problem
here is that you are going to need 2 express 34 ports at the same time. One connecting the SATA drives, and another connecting the SxS card. So
know what? I'm thinking that the way one will have to do this is.....
to dump to the internal Macbook Pro drive first before transfering to
the first SATA drive .... then to the second (backup) SATA drive...
and then go back and delete the footage from the Macbook Pro to free
up space.

Thoughts?

One of the reasons I have a Toshiba is cause it has a PCMCIA and an Expresscard slot.

http://www.satacard.com/pc112.html

To me it makes more sense to go to two FW-800 drives (G-Tech Raid2, Lacie D2) using express 34 slot to transfer cards. Then, once the cards are transferred, plugin your eSATA 34 card and copy from FW-800's to eSATA Array for editing.

You can daisy chain FW 800 very easily and it has redundancy to be safer than going to your internal drive.

I'm a huge a fan of eSATA for the 3GBps speed.

-C

Nice one Christopher!

I see the logic in what you've said but what would you do if you were trying to get away with using a 4-5 bay SATA enclosure for everything? Capture/ Backup/ Editing?

I like the idea of just swaping out small drives as I'll be living/ working in multiple countries for the next couple of years and am trying to keep the weight/ size down.

Any thoughts?

To me it makes more sense to go to two FW-800 drives (G-Tech Raid2, Lacie D2) using express 34 slot to transfer cards. Then, once the cards are transferred, plugin your eSATA 34 card and copy from FW-800's to eSATA Array for editing.

You can daisy chain FW 800 very easily and it has redundancy to be safer than going to your internal drive.

I'm a huge a fan of eSATA for the 3GBps speed.

-C

At 3GBps you should be able to clear those 8GB cards in about 3 seconds. Whew that's fast!