Extra hard drive - which?

[Torsten Blomfeldt]

I need an extra hard drive for video editing. But which?

What about Iomega HDD 120GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive?

What about Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 120 GB/IDE133 8 MB?

Do you have any experience of any of them?

Is any of these a good chooise?

[Peter Moore]

I use a Maxtor 250 GB firewire drive (was about $400 5 months ago). It works great, except sometimes Vegas crashes when reading files from it for some crazy reason. I guess it should be partitioned into 2 125 GB drives, but otherwise it's great.

[Bogdan Vaglarov]

I think USB 2 drives should be avoided as the max speed is high but they do not have steady average speed - not good for video.

Fire Wire is the choice here if you need to move with your data.

Always the best is internal separate drive on master. Internal IDE ATA 100, 133 are also cheaper than external or the new serial ATA.

[Glenn Chan]

IBM deskstars and WD caviars are good for video editing. Some of the Maxtors may also be good (great sustained transfer rates), but they aren't big. The maxtor you listed has good sustained transfer rates, which is really important for video. Theoretically it's the biggest factor for performance. 7200rpm drives speed up performance a lot.

Internal drives are cheap and you can get an adapter card if you already have 2 hard drives in your computer in the master position.

Internal drives are generally much faster than FW drives which are a bit faster than USB2 drives (depending on PC or Mac).

[Ronnie Grahn]

I recently bought a Western Digital with 8 meg cache and I'm very pleased. Can't go wrong wih one of them.

[Torsten Blomfeldt]

Bogdan and Glenn, you two say the second drive should be on "master". Why is that better than "slave"?

And is it hard to fix a second drive into my computer by myself?

[Glenn Chan]

Drives perform best when there is only one of them on the IDE ribbon. When there are two of them, then only one can be in use at one time.

Master and slave usually makes no difference. It's a bit more likely that your drive will work in the master position.

see http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/if/ide/confRecommendations.html
IDE/ATA Configuration and Cabling

It usually isn't hard to install a hard drive yourself. There are articles/tutorials for this around on the internet.

[Gints Klimanis]

I had two IBM deskstars die within a few months of usage.
They were rumored to have some reliability issues.

[Glenn Chan]

<<<-- Originally posted by Gints Klimanis : I had two IBM deskstars die within a few months of usage.
They were rumored to have some reliability issues. -->>>

That affected the earlier models only (75GXP and some earlier ones IIRC). The 120GXP and 180GXP are fine. storagereview.com has a reliability survey of those drives and they do fine. Promax recommends IBM drives.

[Bruce Johnson]

I would like to burn to dvd, playable in stand alone dvd players for the home. I have quite a few mini dv tapes and old analog hi8 tapes i want to convert , not keeping any on the hard drive for an extended period other than to render and finish to dvd. I do have Ulead as a trial and it does work better than Studio 8, however i still get blurbs in the video play back(am i setting up the capture/edit/render, wrong?) The settings in the video apps seem pretty straight forward. My System is a 98SE 30gHD 512rdram Sony DVD RW DRU-500A r+-/rw+-, Duo-connect firewire/usb 2.0, Soundblaster live value, Pana dv 953, if that helps. I was thinking another hardrive could be added and that will give me more room,is there problems with 98SE and adding another hardrive and or editing Digital video? if not i should be able to get internal one for a couple of hundred. Thanks for the advice!

[Adrian Douglas]

There's no problem with 98 and second hard drives but 98 really isn't stable or powerful enough for video editing. You would be better off upgrading to W2k or XP which are more stable products.

[Bruce Johnson]

Thanks for the reply Adrian! If i may bug you again? if i were to buy a new rig where would i find the specs for a good machine? I mean whats really needed Thanks.

[Robert Poulton]

I use Lacie firewire HD and have no problems. Then the internal drives are WD.

Rob

[Adrian Douglas]

What you really need depends on a lot of things, number one is budget. In these times you are only limited by your budget in the performance that can be had. If your budget is limited then I would recommend simply adding a second hard drive as big as you can afford with an 8MB buffer. Brand wise I would use Western Digital, Seagate, or Maxtor. I'd avoid 80GB IBM Deskstars, aptly named Deathstars, as they had a tendancy to die prematurely. If your budget can stretch a little further then I'd go to W2k or XP and then add more RAM. For video work you should run as much RAM as your computer can handle. One of the problems with 98SE is that it dosen't deal well with RAM over 256MB.

If you want to buy a complete system then I'd suggest tracking down someone in your area who builds NLE machines and get them to do it for you, not just the local PC shop, someone who specialises in NLE/graphcs workstations.

The bottom line is big fast drives, lots of RAM and a stable OS. Processor speed is important but only if you are looking for absolute real-time performance and that's when the money hole starts to deepen. Hell, I'm still using my nearly 4yo PIII667, but with 1GB of RAM, SCSI HDDs and a DV500 capture card it does for what I do. Effects rendering takes time but I'm not on any deadlines at the moment.

One other little trick to help speed things along, as well as reduce drive fragmentation is to set up a partition for your virtual memory/swap file/pagefile. You should set the partition to 3x the amount of RAM in your system then point the page file to this partition. If your not sure how to do this let me know and I'll throw together a quick how to for you.

[Bruce Johnson]

This is an offer from a local comp builder he did not give me a price, what would it be? ballpark? I am leaning towards buying a new machine either from a local builder or Dell. [ The Motherboard has an MSI 874PE w/533/800Mhz Front Side Buss and Hyper Threading Technology. What this means is it has a bigger pipe for data and you will be able to upgrade to P4 chips with HTT technology when the prices come down from the stratosphere. HTT allows for multiple processes to execute on the CPU, in essence multiple chips in one. Video eats this up and some applications take advantage of this right now. The motherboard has room for growth in the future with five PCI slots, 8 USB 2.0 ports and it also uses MSI recommended High Performance Kingston Dual Channel RAM, with ‘Over Clocking’ capabilities if you want to squeak out that extra bit of performance. As we discussed this has a RAID set up in running two 120GB HDs for speed and storage space. The next step in the RAID would be to add two more drives to complete the set. The video card is a Nvidia based Gainward 128MB ‘Golden Sample’ full featured graphics cards that I am sure will exceed your video requirements. All of it being powered by an Enermax 460watt power supply housed in an attractive black & silver Mid-Tower case and matching Logitech Z-34 Speakers. Controlling all this power is the Logitech cordless Keyboard & Optical mouse, topped of with a ViewSonic 17” monitor!]