View Full Version : Anyone used an external FireWire 800 HD with a Mac?


Nick Weeks
August 20th, 2006, 10:13 PM
Has anyone used this hard drive?

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It's a Lacie external 600GB drive with a FireWire 800 interface... a freat buy for $320! My internal drives are just too small for the amount of video work I've been doing lately, so I'm considering this as a good disk to capture my footage on.

What I'm concerned with is the speed. How does it compare to an internal drive? I know FireWire 800 is supposed to be exremely fast, but I'm a little worried for video performace.

I edit SD with Final Cut Pro 5 on the 2GHz dual-core G5

Nate Weaver
August 20th, 2006, 11:20 PM
A drive like this is good up to about 60mb/sec read and a little slower write. Enough speed even for uncompressed work, although it will bog down in places.

Way way way more than fast enough for DV work.

Philip Skaist
August 22nd, 2006, 02:49 PM
like nate said it's more than enough for DV. I edit 720P DVCpro HD from an HVX on a firewire 800. Also I would check out the reliability of Lacie. I've had many problems with their "big disk" a firewire 800 disk. If i have my info correct, they have two 250 gig hard drives and its in a raid configuration. Good luck!

Matt Crane
August 23rd, 2006, 06:44 AM
like nate said it's more than enough for DV. I edit 720P DVCpro HD from an HVX on a firewire 800. Also I would check out the reliability of Lacie. I've had many problems with their "big disk" a firewire 800 disk. If i have my info correct, they have two 250 gig hard drives and its in a raid configuration. Good luck!

Some of their drives do have 2 internal drives, however I know the model I have is actually 1 5.25" 500GB drive. I haven't had any problems with mine.

But worth checking out.....

Loren Miller
August 23rd, 2006, 12:12 PM
I'm a longtime LaCie user but you have to be careful with them. I lost an entire drive due to a lightning strike and not even Diskwarrior could recover it.

They are perfect for multistream DV-- IF

1) you plug them in carefully at each end before powering up.
2) you don't daisychain them. Bring each drive in to a plug separately.
3) you plug them into a host adapter card-- get them off the main FW bus and any bus shared with your capture deck, camera, or an iSight camera.
4) you don't get any FW drive beyond 160 GB. More than this is a lot of data to lose and restore.

These days, I'm looking at SATA solutions.

HTH

- Loren

Julian Banos
August 30th, 2006, 05:55 AM
I'm editing with an 800 fw external hard drive. I'm using HDV and DVCpro hd and so far I have not had a problem.
It's not a LaCie, it's a G-TECH hard drive. I tried to capture 720p uncompressed, but I was not able to. So if you stay with DV, HDV and DVCpro HD you should not have a problem.

Daniel Stevenson
August 30th, 2006, 06:20 AM
Sometimes with my Lacie drives they just don't appear on my desktop. It took a bit of digging around and then I found something on this board (maybe another, not sure) that mentioned the problem isn't the drive but the power supply.

What I've found is that when you turn off your drive ALSO switch off the power to the power box. Leaving it on standby when your drive is off seems to be the cause of this non-appearance.

Chris Hocking
August 30th, 2006, 06:39 AM
Loren, what's the problem with daisy chaining them? I've got three Lacie's daisy chained at the moment, and haven't noticed any issues. Should I be scared?

Cal Thorpe
August 30th, 2006, 10:25 AM
I always go with Other World Computing. I buy the Mercury Elite Pro FW 800. Extremely reliable. Mac magazines always rate them super high. They're made just for Macs. You can daisy chain. I've got four DC'd right now editing 720p HD with AIC.

Scott Loiselle
August 31st, 2006, 07:12 PM
Hi folks. I have a dual FW800 dockable thing from Wiebetech, as well as some of their other stuff. They're mac freaks and make very good products. It's a bit more dough but I try to 'buy it once, buy it right' when I can afford to.

Best, Scott Loiselle