External Hard Drive for FCP?

I have a couple of external FireWire drives from Lacie. They are 2 years old and not all that big. But I just got FC Studio and it says at the beginning that you should move your files to an external drive. So...

I have the new 15" power mac and a dual g5.

Is there a certain speed (RPM) HD required?

Is it better to use internal ones or is external okay?

Does 400 or 800 firewire matter?

Is there playback or quality issues with external? (I was told there could be when I only used iMovie)

Thanks for all and any help!!!

I love this forum.
Shawn

[Boyd Ostroff]

Unless the new versions have changed, iMovie can only use the startup drive.

I assume you mean 15" Powerbook? I've had good luck with a number of external firewire drives, most of which are Maxtor. But I don't think the brand matters much. Firewire 400 works fine for me. Be sure you get 7200 RPM mechanisms, and be sure they have fast interfaces like the Oxford 911 chipset. For regular DV that's all you should need.

I don't have issues connecting a camcorder and more than one external FW 400 drive to my dual G5, but your mileage may vary. I use Sony camcorders; people with Canon products seem to have a lot of firewire issues.

From everything I've read, all the macs (including PowerMac dual G5's) only have a single firewire bus. The FW 400 and 800 ports actually share the same bus. When I went to South America I wanted to be sure I didn't have any issues, so I got a cardbus firewire PC card to add another port (you could do the same thing with a PCI card on a G5 tower). This only cost about $30 so it seemed like cheap insurance. I connected the camera to the card and the external drive to the built-in port. No problems with a Z1. As a bonus, copying files between two external FW 400 drives was much faster with this two-bus setup.

Thanks Boyd

Big help!