Shot Put?

[Ed Kukla]

I looked at the Shot Put Pro website. Not much detail.

I'm told SP will download to multiple hard drives simultaneously with no speed loss. If so, making 2 copies would take half as long. That's a big time savings.

I'm told that SP is faster than clip browser at transferring clips. Another big timesaver, if true.

With faster speeds and simultaneous copying, it seems to be a must have...

I'm using a MacBookPro 17 with one Expresscard slot for input & the firewire 800 output (or USB). I usually daisychain 2 drives via firewire 800.

Any Shot Put Pro users that can address these claims?

[Alister Chapman]

Yes it does what it says on the tin.

It is a little faster than Clip Browser, but USB drives or slower drive connections will act as a bottleneck so I doubt in many cases you'll notice much of a difference for a single copy. It's the multiple copies where it really excels.

In addition you can get shotput to format the card once the backup has been done and verified. This is good practice as if you make the decision to NEVER delete cards or footage your self and always let shotput do it. The only way a card can become empty is by backing it up. If you ever put a card in the camera and find footage on it you will know it has NOT been backed up.

[Ed Kukla]

Not interested in the formatting feature. I have over a dozen cards. I hold them until I get confirmation from post that all is good.

I understand the USB bottleneck. As I mentioned, I daisy chain 2 drives to the firewire 800 port of my MBP.
.................................................................................................... ......................................................
Here is the meat of the matter: Will I get the same download speed simultaneously to 2 drives as I usually get with CB to 1 drive? In other words, can I expect my downloading to 2 drives to be twice as fast with SP over CB? Doubling the speed of download is significant.

[Alister Chapman]

Probably not twice as fast, but certainly about 1.5 to 1.8x

[Lance Librandi]

Hi Ed,
I use Shotput Pro all the time great software I use Esata drives only, I have found it works faster on my MB pro with OS 10.5 and a lot slower on my MacPro on OS 10.6.

[Ed Kukla]

Lance

Slower with newer software?

I don't think I can use e-sata. MBP has one express card slot for the EX media leaving the one Firewire 800.

[Lonnie Bell]

Ed,
Which drives are you using that have multiple firewire 800 ports for daisy chaining? And I'm familiar with raids acting as one large drive, but not familiar with daisy chaining multiple drives to one computer port allowing for more than one drive being recognized for simultaneous separate backups - would you mind elaborating? Or are you just mirroring?

Thanks,
Lonnie

[Ed Kukla]

Client bought some 1T Lacie drives at Microcenter that had 2 firewire 800, plus firewire 400, USB & E-sata. I daisychained the first drive to the second drive using both Firewire 800 ports on the first drive. Sorry, don't remember the model.
These were desktop AC powered models.

I also use the small rugged Lacie drives and go Firewire 800 into the first and use the 400 port to daisychain.

[Lonnie Bell]

Thanks for replying Ed...
Does the Macbook recognize two external drives when you daisy chain (ie, two Disk icons on the desktop), or do you just set up a Raid 1 where it records the redundancy to the second drive?
Thanks,
Lonnie

[Chris Medico]

Firewire allows for daisy chaining of drives. Each drive is free to communicate with any other item on the chain without the computer having to regulate anything. Its a peer to peer style network.

Each drive in the chain will show up individually on the desktop.

You can do this with a PC or a MAC. The trick is to find a hard drive enclosure with the right connectors to allow it to be chained with others.

Firewire doesn't support creating RAIDs across separate chained drives. What you can do is get an external multi drive enclosure that supports RAID and has a firewire interface. They are easily found with a quick web search.

[Lonnie Bell]

Great info Chris - Thank you!

I'm familiar with multidrive enclosures, it was the daisy chaining that I never came across before. And since I just went from the XHA1 to the EX1R - I'm very interested in dumping off cards in the field with quick redundancy via my MBP...

Thanks again,
Lonnie

[Steve Kalle]

With Firewire daisy-chaining, the bandwidth is shared among all firewire devices. So, with 2 FW800 drives connected to just one FW800 port on your MB Pro, the total bandwidth is limited by the single port.

[Ed Kukla]

so shot put would be useless?

[Chris Medico]

Originally Posted by Ed Kukla

so shot put would be useless?

Its for sure worth it. You will see higher throughput with firewire drives than USB even with a couple of drives chained together.

[Dano Motley]

The one problem with shotput is that it does not print on blu ray disks as advertised using the primera printer. brought this to SP's attention when i first bought it....there still working on it.

Dano