External Hard Drive With Edius questions

[Deane Johnson]

I am using Edius with the Edius program on my internal computer hard drive and my content files on an external hard drive.

The external hard drives I have been using are the Lacie 500 Gig USB 2.0/Firewire models, and I have been using the Firewire to feed them. I have had bad luck with the Lacies. Of the three I have, two have been in for warranty repair, and now all are out of warranty and two of the three are down again. I think I've had enough of Lacie and need to switch to Western Digital.

My question has to do with interface. Is USB 2.0 better for Edius, or is Firewire better? Or, does it make any difference? The USB 2.0 only models are much cheaper.

Thanks

[Imagine Video]

e sata would be my choice and Seagate would be my drive choice at present

I am about to add and Esata pci card to my older pc and purchase an esata drive enclosure and put a 500 gig seagate sata 2 drive in for archive purposes

Think this is the best way to go at the moment. data rates are high and you should have no problem using this external drive setup for editing if you want to!

The drives inside your Lacie may still be ok it may only be the interface electrickery that has failed.

I would get the drive out and see don't just throw away you never know what make drive it may be?

[johannesj]

I agre E-sata is what you need.
USB is crap for use with video or audio on external hd.
Firewire gives mor stable transfere then usb, i newer use usb for video or audio.
I use E-sata for all my external drives.
My best
Johannes

[PaulTV]

also for no good reason I could ever find, Seagate Firewire 7200rpm drives are much "slower" than Maxtor external drives of the same speed - Seagates are reported as too slow to capture HDV (as HQ ) by Edius,whereas external Maxtors are completely happy - maybe cache size, who knows?

Yep, go e sata any day...

Paul

[Jeff Chandler]

My question has to do with interface. Is USB 2.0 better for Edius, or is Firewire better? Or, does it make any difference? The USB 2.0 only models are much cheaper.

Thanks

For SD video, I have been using USB 2.0 since it's inception and I have never had a problem. I also use firewire drives without problem. I would guess that your problem is your particular drive and not the interface.

[GrassValley_BH]

If I had to choose... in order of preference, most-preferred first for video use:

• eSATA
• FireWire
• USB 2.0
• Gigabit Ethernet (only because of network latency and it being a "less direct" route to get video data)

On external HDDs in general, heat is the #1 silent killer of drives (shock is the #1 non-silent killer of drives)!!

Many external HDD enclosures are not designed for 24/7 or heavy continuous use as is the case with video editing.

There are drives that are designed for continuous use, like Western Digital's MyDVR, but check what it's optimized for.

MyDVR is designed to run quieter and run all the time, but its primary function is for TiVo units, where it's moving HD MPEG-2 streams, so the throughput may not be maximized.

It should, however, be optimized for multiple streams, as the TiVo HD and TiVo Series 3 are capable of recording two channels and playing back a recorded show simultaneously, so that's three streams.

Again, depends on your use. If you search around, you can get the part/model numbers for OEM hard drives designed for continuous use.

That said, I have a bunch of "regular" Maxtors that have been running for about 3 years straight in my fileserver. 4 out of the 12 didn't make it (just out of warranty too) and were later replaced.

[Jeff Chandler]

If I had to choose... in order of preference, most-preferred first for video use:

• eSATA
• FireWire
• USB 2.0
• Gigabit Ethernet (only because of network latency and it being a "less direct" route to get video data)

On external HDDs in general, heat is the #1 silent killer of drives (shock is the #1 non-silent killer of drives)!!

I wouldn't disagree with this (because I'm not half as smart or knowledgable as you =), and I know that it is conventional wisdom, but over the past several years I have had problems with firewire drives where I have never had problems with USB 2.0, and I have been using them for years for DV capture and storage. And it's not a case of failed drives. The firewire drives that I've had problems with worked fine for standard file storage, just not for DV capture and playback (but particularly capture). Maybe I've just been lucky with USB 2.0 and unlucky with firewire?

[GrassValley_BH]

I do give credence to your comments Jeff!

If you're working with a number of drives, I've had more trouble with having multiple FireWire drives than I've had with having multiple USB 2.0 drives.

[3chip]

HD Drives

I have been using Maxtor II and Maxtor III External HD's for several years now, daisy chained firewire. The first ones were 300 GB. I have 4 of those. The next two were 500 GB. Then a 1.5 TB. I do not capture nor edit in HDV, just SD. I recently purchases a 500 GB Maxtor which went bad right away. I had a lot of hoops to jump through to get it replaced but the replacement is now up and running. Eight HD's daisy chained. These drives are great for my purposes, no trouble capturing or editing on and if I want to take one of them to a different computer it's very simple.

[GrassValley_BH]

To add further, the chip used in the SATA-FireWire or PATA-FireWire bridge board makes a big difference. Oxford is the preferred bridge chip, but I've had trouble with even those too. I had 16 drives daisy-chained (Master/Slave across 8 bridge boards). It worked for a while then Windows got REALLY, REALLY, REALLY confused.

At least 3chip's working OK with multiple FireWire drives though, so there's hope!!

[Deane Johnson]

There are a number of very worthwhile responses here and some good education for me. Thanks.

I'm not quite ready to go the eSata route due to cost, but it looks like the way to go. I may have my next computer built that capacity already installed.

I don't do lengthy editing. Nothing commercial. I have been careless, however, with letting the Lacies run a lot of the time. Perhaps I contributed unnecessarily to their demise.

Any advice on whether or not I should have Lacie repair them. Seems that with replacements running $169, or less, it might not be worthwhile. Any thoughts.

Thanks again.

[GrassValley_BH]

I'd weigh the cost of getting a new drive and current capacity cost of a similar/better unit against the repair cost.

[STORMDAVE]

eSATA is pretty cheap. You can build one yourself.

If you don't do anything fancy and don't require high datarates, then there are alot of external RAID1 eSATA drives. Just pop in 2 750GB drives (or 2 x 1TB drives, if you have the cash) and fire away. You will always have a mirror.

I am doing everything manually right now (for now). I'll be investing in an external SATA box with RAID5 pretty soon. I still haven't decided on how I am going to share this same setup between 2 computers. Right now I am using my Storm2 system (in sig) as a server and editing station via direct gigabit. So far it's been flawless for SD editing. Once the RAID box comes in, I wonder how I will share it...format it as HFS+ and share it to the PC? Hmmm....

[Blast1]

Currently have 4TB of external eSata II drives, the price came to $270 a TB for 500gig seagate drives(5yr warranty) and Kingwin enclosures plus 2 $7 eSATA to SATA pass through brackets for my desktops and $50 adapter for laptops, since I'm using intermediate codecs I don't need any raids, if I did it would be simple to redo a set of drives into a raid configuration or add more brackets. Moving projects from one computer to another to do different things is simple and quick.

[Deane Johnson]

eSATA is pretty cheap. You can build one yourself.

If you don't do anything fancy and don't require high datarates, then there are alot of external RAID1 eSATA drives. Just pop in 2 750GB drives (or 2 x 1TB drives, if you have the cash) and fire away. You will always have a mirror.

I am doing everything manually right now (for now). I'll be investing in an external SATA box with RAID5 pretty soon. I still haven't decided on how I am going to share this same setup between 2 computers. Right now I am using my Storm2 system (in sig) as a server and editing station via direct gigabit. So far it's been flawless for SD editing. Once the RAID box comes in, I wonder how I will share it...format it as HFS+ and share it to the PC? Hmmm....

I'm sort of doing a manual Raid 1 right now. I have two 500 Gig Lacies and simply copy over to the second at the end of a session. A little primitive, but the way these things have been going down, it's a life saver.

Does anyone have a favorite source to purcase components in one of these eSata setups?