I recently became aware of the new LaCie mobile hard drives. Im specifically talking about the most compact Porsche designed drives which do not require an AC power Adapter. These things seem like the perfect companion for on-the-go editing. And I hope I can use this drive to accompany my PowerBook G4.

Right now I use one of LaCie's desktop drives and love it (250 gig Triple Interface). However the power adapter and the size are a little annoying when I'm in a hurry. So my question first is...Has anybody used the new mobile hard drives?

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10655

They have three different speeds 4200, 5400, and 7200rpm. Price wise I'm thinking about buying the 60 gig 5400 rpm mobile drive. Just enough space to do a project while im on the road. I think the 7200 would obviously be a better choice because it is faster, but its also significantly more expensive. Has anybody had problems editing with a 5400 rpm drive? My Desktop drive is 7200 so I have never used a slower drive and could imagine there might be problems.

I edit with FCP HD and would probably be working from about 30 gigs of raw footage. Not a lot of rendering and little to no audio rendering.

I appreciate any feedback you guys might have.

Rule of thumb with DV files, 8meg cache, 7200 rpm. Anything less is a risk. I wouldn't buy anything less.

2MB cache is fine.
For Mac laptop users, a 4200rpm internal can be more reliable than an external firewire drive (because firewire drives can run into sharing/conflict issues with other FW devices on the same bus).

2- I'd look at getting a Maxtor onetouch with a rebate deal, or get a firewire drive off newegg.com or other reputable online vendor

The rebate deals can be cheaper, although you have to mess with the rebate.

3- I'd lean towards getting a bigger drive. You're in trouble when you run out of storage.

Having extra room means you waste less time deleting stuff (when you delete stuff, you should really think about what you're doing to prevent user error; and that takes time).

Are you positive that the porche drives require no external power.

I know we have a few ultra small 80gb firewire800 drives. They power fine off of a desktop bus but on a laptop it requires a 5v power adapter.

Any yeah i've used a porsche drive before...nothing overly fantastic. It's smaller and portable but I think the price doesn't justfy the means.

yes they run with no external power. This is one of the biggest selling points for me. Also the fact that they advertise them as being extremely durable. Anybody else have an alternate drive I should be looking at that they can recommend? Reliability, Durability, and lack of external power are the most important things as far as travelling with a drive goes.

Does anybody else doubt the stability and speed of the Porsche drive with a PowerBook G4?

Thanx

For speed all the LaCies I've used are just fine for DV. But I do doubt their long-term reliability. I of course can't speak for this new drive, but I've had LaCie external drives fail twice (both less than one year old with moderate use), and I'm not the only one who's had trouble with the Porsche drives failing. I find they are not rugged, and they have poor cooling. This new drive sounds like it's meant for travel, but in my experience, LaCie has no track record for making a reliable, portable drive.

I tend to side with Richard on this one. I've had problems with firewire drives slower than 7200 RPM, also with a 7200 RPM drive with a slow interface.

Just recently I faced the same choice for my trip to Argentina where I needed >100GB drive space plus a second mirror drive for backup. I looked at the various 5400 RPM bus powered drives. Very attractive in terms of price/size/weight. Take a look at CompUSA and Best Buy. They now have a bunch of varieties of this sort of drive.

But I chickened out on trusting these drives for editing on my powerbook. They are big and heavy, and the power bricks are huge, but I took two of my Maxtor 160GB one-touch drives. Not one single glitch in two weeks of heavy editing and copying.

I would love for someone to convince me these could be replaced with those little drives, cause the larger ones are a pain to lug around. Also, most of those little drives seem to top out around 100GB (and the large ones get expensive). That's a little smaller than I'm comfortable with on most projects. I like to keep a big margin of free space on my drives. I got up to around 125GB on the Maxtor 160 and started getting nervous. So I went to the Render Manager in FCP and started trashing stuff I hoped I was done with :-)

One other thing - while at Best Buy I picked up a PC card firewire interface. I plugged the Maxtor drive into the Powerbook's internal firewire 400, and plugged the Z-1 into the PC card. I just didn't want to chance dropped frames, aborted captures, etc. This worked perfectly, and also speeds up backups between two firewire drives (plugged one into the PC card, the other on the internal port).

The card I got is a "DYNEX IEEE 1394 Firewire Notebook Card DX-FC202". I think it cost $30 - cheap insurance against I/O problems plus significant speed boost when backing up 100+ GB.

yeah your better off with a little more space and the 7200 i am also considering getting one of these mobile drives especially since i work at home go to school and work so having something like this would be easier to carry around over the bigger desktop drives