Best firewire drive to use as media drive at DVinfo.net

Heath McKnight · October 22nd, 2005, 12:52 PM

What do you think are good external firewire drives for media (QuickTime, etc.) and other stuff?

http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-RAID.cfm (or the drive)

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firew...4/USB/EliteAL/

Anything else? BTW, forget LaCie--I've seen three drives die in under a year and that's terrible.

heath

Dan Robinson · October 28th, 2005, 12:28 PM

I have two Maxtor 250GBs that have lasted for over a year of heavy use and travel.

Alain Aguilar · October 28th, 2005, 03:39 PM

Is there a big performance difference between using the firewire 800 transfer and an internal ide or sata hard drive. I noticed that the benchmark for the firewire G-Tech drive was of 53 MBs(read) on 1 Mb file. Isn't the read/write performance of an regular IDE drive of 133 mbs?

Damien Molineaux · October 29th, 2005, 02:24 PM

Yes internal drives will be faster than firewire drives. The drives in firewire cases are IDE, and there is a kind of transformer from IDE to firewire, but the limit is the speed of the drive.

The best solution appearing right now is SATA. There are numerous types of PCI or PCI-X cards with both internal and external SATA connections. LaCie markets D2 drives where they include a card for the same price as a firewire drive. This is much faster than firewire 800 and there is no overhead as the data is transfered natively since both the connection (cables) and drives are SATA.

Personnaly I've ordered a Sonnet Tempo-X 4+4 card and their Jive system allowing to add 3 drives inside a G5. I've discovered since there are some cards out there that allow you to make RAID drives without requiring processing power. I don't know if this is the case of the Tempo-X, but anyhow I'll have a three drive RAID to start off with and when required I'll be able to add an external four drive RAID.

Cheers,
Damien Molineaux
earthling productions

PS Also, this is well documented, the implementation of firewire 800 on all G5s (except maybe the dual-cores which haven't been tested yet) is flawed and not nearly as speedy as it should be.

Alain Aguilar · October 29th, 2005, 11:35 PM

I agree Damien, I've used different combinations of Firewire drives on a G5 and the performance is not as good as with the internal ATA drives.

October 22nd, 2005, 12:52 PM	#1
Heath McKnight MPS Digital Studios Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Palm Beach County, Florida Posts: 8,531	Best firewire drive to use as media drive What do you think are good external firewire drives for media (QuickTime, etc.) and other stuff? http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-RAID.cfm (or the drive) http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firew...4/USB/EliteAL/ Anything else? BTW, forget LaCie--I've seen three drives die in under a year and that's terrible. heath __________________ My Final Cut Pro X blog

October 28th, 2005, 03:39 PM	#3
Alain Aguilar Regular Crew Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: North Bergen Posts: 170	Is there a big performance difference between using the firewire 800 transfer and an internal ide or sata hard drive. I noticed that the benchmark for the firewire G-Tech drive was of 53 MBs(read) on 1 Mb file. Isn't the read/write performance of an regular IDE drive of 133 mbs? __________________ Alain

October 29th, 2005, 02:24 PM	#4
Damien Molineaux New Boot Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: based in Geneva\|Switzerland Posts: 17	media drives Yes internal drives will be faster than firewire drives. The drives in firewire cases are IDE, and there is a kind of transformer from IDE to firewire, but the limit is the speed of the drive. The best solution appearing right now is SATA. There are numerous types of PCI or PCI-X cards with both internal and external SATA connections. LaCie markets D2 drives where they include a card for the same price as a firewire drive. This is much faster than firewire 800 and there is no overhead as the data is transfered natively since both the connection (cables) and drives are SATA. Personnaly I've ordered a Sonnet Tempo-X 4+4 card and their Jive system allowing to add 3 drives inside a G5. I've discovered since there are some cards out there that allow you to make RAID drives without requiring processing power. I don't know if this is the case of the Tempo-X, but anyhow I'll have a three drive RAID to start off with and when required I'll be able to add an external four drive RAID. Cheers, Damien Molineaux earthling productions PS Also, this is well documented, the implementation of firewire 800 on all G5s (except maybe the dual-cores which haven't been tested yet) is flawed and not nearly as speedy as it should be.

October 29th, 2005, 11:35 PM	#5
Alain Aguilar Regular Crew Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: North Bergen Posts: 170	I agree Damien, I've used different combinations of Firewire drives on a G5 and the performance is not as good as with the internal ATA drives. __________________ Alain

October 28th, 2005, 12:28 PM	#2
Dan Robinson Regular Crew Join Date: Mar 2004 Location: Charleston, West Virginia Posts: 131	I have two Maxtor 250GBs that have lasted for over a year of heavy use and travel.