I can't make any recomendations from personal experience but I've made some research. I chose against the Maxtor drive because I read posts and reviews that mentioned the drive failing after a short period of time. Also it doesn't seem to have a power switch. Therefore I chose to get the Lacie equivilant, they seem to have a good reputation in the mac community.

I couldn't find exactly the drive I'm getting but this is close: http://www.macmall.com/macmall/shop/detail.asp?action=CrossSell&options=SC&dpno=138841#scroll

I'm getting the one with 250Gb 8mb chache next week, I'll report back with my impressions of it.

building my own firewire harddrive. is it ok?
 

i found a Maxtor hard drive (160gb, 7200rpm, 8mb buffer) for $100. I was wondering if i bought one of those firewire cases for $100 and turned it into a firewire hard drive, would it work just as good as if i bought a maxtor external firewire hard drive? has anyone ever done this before? did it work? is maxtor a decient hard drive? any dropped frames while editing with a maxtor drive?

A lot of firewire kits are just that. They are a regular drive popped into a kit. I don't see the big deal. I have two just like this. 72000rpm is good.

There have been descriptions of the screen shots of Panther and it is still GUI, some argument as to how big of a departure from the Aqua interface it may be. Some say it is more brushed metal.

Most of the comments I've seen have concerned the under the hood parts not the user interface parts.

Some recent discussions say that the G5s may not be ready for WWDC. I wouldn't be surprised about that since the OS apparently isn't there yet. I would still hope that it was demoed and announced. After all there was a big gap between when the 17" Powerbooks were announced and advertised and when they were available. I suspect most of us would want dual processors and everything I've read suggests they won't be available until fall at the earliest.

Thanks guys for your input!

[Bengamin]

Thing is that I need a huge Drive and I thought this was a good deal. After reading your recommendations that all firewire drives are really IDE in an external Firewire case I think is better to just buy an internal IDE and save some bucks. Maybe I'll buy a Firewire case for it! :)



[Imran]
BTW I would like to hear your experience after you buy your new HD I'll be checking for your post.


Thanks guys

I typically export the timeline in "NTSC DV/DVCPro" format with the audio at 48kHz. I then use Cleaner to compress this raw DV stream as needed.

Well, sort of. THe external drives are just internal IDE drives in a firewire case. However, sticking the SAME big internal drive in a Powermac may leave you very disappointed. The problem is the interface. AFAIK, only the very newest G4s can handle the big drives. The rest of them will read the drives but they will only allow you to access around 135 gb. You can get around this with a PCI board in the Mac or with external drive (where the chip to handle the bigger drive is already present).

So, if you have an older Mac then you'll likely need to go the external FW drive route (or add a card).

This isn't just a Mac issue. If you look at the boxes for the big internal drives they often come with the necessary cards - for PCs.

External storage for a Mac?
 

Hi people. Ive got a dual 867 Mac.
Im about to do some editing of an hours worth of footage with FCP3.
Would it be a good idea to get an external drive to dump all the stuff in? Theres a 125gig external HD on sale in town for £200. If I put all my editing stuff on there, would it work ok?

In my own (admittedly limited) experience, just about any 7200 RPM firewire drive should be fine. I have three different ones, from ACOM, Maxtor and Western Digital. No problems with any of them using FCP 3. Only caveat: I'm still using MacOS 9.2 on older G4/733.

You just need to make sure the chipset in the external case can handle a 160 gb drive. It wouldn't hurt to check out the information at www.xlr8yourmac.com

Iw ould say 72000 is great mine is just a 7200 and it works fine ;)

You might not want to spend so much on a case I got a case off ebay for 35 bucks myroom mate and I both did actually, he put a 200 and I put a 250 in haven't had a single problem with it. Final cost was about 300 bucks for an external 250gb hard drive, not bad.

(it was a chronos case and I believe a WD harddrive)

I'm a step lower (dual 800) and have no problems with my external hardrive running os 10.2.6.8.3.5.3.5.3.3.4 or whatever they're up to now.

I've had nothing but good luck with Maxtor drives. All you need for DV is 5400 RPM and I haven't seen any faster than 7200 (though I'm sure they exist somewhere). You really don't need more than 7200, as DV isn't THAT data intensive. If you are doing uncompressed video that's another story.

Upgrading to Quicktime pro
 

I just got my FCP4 today, and no matter what I do the serial for QT Pro isn't working. Is there something other than my own name I should enter?

Got it.

Had to put the name "Quicktime Pro" in :)