I'm the editor/videographer at a station where I have several projects going on at the same time. Everything from promotional tags to hour long documentries. But I only have two G4s with FinalCut Pro to do everything on.

I was thinking that one solution to having room for everything was getting some external drives that I can store the media from the various documentries on. That way I can keep them seperate and move them from computer to computer. It won't be done until almost a year from now, but the producer wants to get things started and do some "teaser" pieces for it.

What is a good external drive that I can read and write to for editing? What are the price ranges? I hear that firewire drives are too slow... what are the other options?

Thanks!

Hi, judging from your post, I guess you probably haven't yet read my review of the Videonics FireStore -- see http://www.dvinfo.net/firestore.htm -- and as you'll see in the article, FireWire drives are *plenty* fast enough for DV. Details at link, hope this helps,

This RAID system may be overkill but cruise around the site. SmartDisk makes an excellent product. The best feature about firewire driver are the ability to be hot-swapable (no reboot) and good through put although USB 2.0 is said to compete with MB/sec rate

http://www.smartdisk.com/products_RAID.asp

check out Medea-SCSI RAID. expensive, but a station can afford it and the thruput can be as high as 80mb/sec. Geez, you can go completely uncompressed with that.

<<<-- Originally posted by EAnderson : I'm the editor/videographer at a station where I have several projects going on at the same time. Everything from promotional tags to hour long documentries. But I only have two G4s with FinalCut Pro to do everything on.

I was thinking that one solution to having room for everything was getting some external drives that I can store the media from the various documentries on. That way I can keep them seperate and move them from computer to computer. It won't be done until almost a year from now, but the producer wants to get things started and do some "teaser" pieces for it.

What is a good external drive that I can read and write to for editing? What are the price ranges? I hear that firewire drives are too slow... what are the other options?

Thanks! -->>>

My external firewire drive on my Xpress DV system runs plenty fast enough.