External hard drive question for small video production

[Terry Lee]

This is great information but I'm not so sure it CRITICALLY applies to my work flow as it is now. Honestly, I am only going to be capturing footage (720p/1080i ..you know this) to tape after which I will plug (the camera) directly to the 1TB hard drive of a MacPro via fire wire where I will render all the footage (probably in adobe premere), work with it a bit, crop some scenes, delete others and save everything to the external drive to save for further editing. Then when I am done, burn a few DVDs and be done with all the excess footage and perhaps keep a version on the hard drive.

In the future I plan on obtaining my own work station but as of now I'm not finanically stable enough (layed off) to afford a MacPro system with a couple TB of space so I will be using my universities systems to edit from.

I was initially thinking something smaller and more portable but honestly I don't care as long as my work doesn't get lost due to a crashing hard drive or something else.

[Bryan Daugherty]

Ervin, Shaun, Terry - I have to say I am a big fan of the Lacie Drives but one of my big clients often supplies me with the WD My Book Pro and we have had very few issues with them, I have had problems with the sleepmode on long form edits too, but you can work around it. They are reliable and are usually in stock at staples, officemax, and office depot which means no shipping charges. They are fan cooled so they are generally a little more noisy then my lacies and tend to make a buzzing sound when they first spin up (or wake up.) They can be configured Raid 1 or 0, so the data safety can be a bonus.

I agree with Shaun on the 2 TB vs 1.5TB issue. I often have opted to purchase 2x 750GB instead of 1x 1TB in the past because the $ per GB (or TB) just made more sense and you get the option of configuring one as a Backup drive (lacie's one touch backup software is great) if you want data security. The other thing to consider with Raid 0 is if one drive fails you lose all data on the array, but i am sure you have given consideration to a backup plan.

[Ervin Farkas]

Originally Posted by Bryan Daugherty

I have had problems with the sleepmode on long form edits too, but you can work around it... They are fan cooled...

Never needed so far, but may need to keep them 'alive' in the future. Bryan, what is the trick to keep them from going to sleep?

And are you sure your WDs have fans? I have three of them, the one already mentioned, and two 500GB black blocks - none of these have fans.

[Bryan Daugherty]

One trick in premiere pro CS3 is to click on the media that you know is on that drive and play it for 5 sec (or until it plays smooth in the preview window) and then do your render, generally it will stay awake because it will encounter this incidence on the timeline before it has a chance to go asleep again which will reset the sleep counter. If it is real deep into your timeline i open up just that drive in a "my computer" window and bring that to the front every 30 minutes or so, as long as something is trying to access that drive it will stay awake.

Fans...I don't know what to tell you here. I went to the WD website and they have done a redesign, the models they show are different than the ones I am using with the round button and round led in front. And even so they don't specify if they are fanless or not. In my experience this thing puts out a lot more airflow than I would associate with convection currents and I hope the load noises I hear when it is working in overdrive are a fan because it can be quite loud (kind of like a hairdryer on the low setting.) If the drive is making those noises than I would be much more concerned about stability.

In reference to your statement "none of them have fans" have you ever opened the case? Perhaps you just have never heated them up enough to kick the fans into overdrive. I did find several people on the B&H website who note this same issue in the reviews on this drive so i know i am not imagining it.

(Speculation alert) One of them claims a firmware upgrade fixed the issue, i would think it more likely that WD replaced the fan in newer units with a quieter one or tweaked the thermal limits so it won't go into overdrive unless it is really hot. But those are speculations.