External HDD Question

[hdvideo]

I need to purchase another external HDD. I edit mostly HDV stuff in Edius 4.5.

What is the minimum bandwith or data rate transfer speed i should buy?

I was thinking about the new seagate 500g or 1T drive. It has a 400MBPS. The fastest connection i would have is firewire 4. I don't believe i have an esata connection.

Thanks for your help.

Brent

[Philip]

I need to purchase another external HDD. I edit mostly HDV stuff in Edius 4.5.

What is the minimum bandwith or data rate transfer speed i should buy?

I was thinking about the new seagate 500g or 1T drive. It has a 400MBPS. The fastest connection i would have is firewire 4. I don't believe i have an esata connection.

Thanks for your help.

Brent

I would get an external drive that has both USB and eSATA connectors. They are readily available now. USB will do ok till you get eSATA connectors. Often when you purchase a drive enclosure with eSATA on the the back they will send you a bracket that goes in one of your desktop slots. It plugs into an available onboard SATA port and converts it on the back of your computer to an eSATA connection. Here is an alternative I am looking at right now.

http://www.mwave.com/mwave/viewspec.hmx?scriteria=BA25086&RSKU=BA25086

You just plug a bare drive into it and off you go. Easy swapping in and out of drives. If you upconvert HDV to HQ files then eSATA will be much more capable and workable for you. The above option does not include the small bracket I was telling you about but they can be found online very easily and inexpensively.

[hdvideo]

I appreciate this.

Could you direct me to a drive that would work in this unit? And what is this bracket called so i may look for it?

[Imagine Video]

HDvideo Look at the ANTEC MX-1 This has ALL you need and will take the seagate 1TB drive You will not be dissapointed.

It has the braket and sata cable for internal connection ALONG with the E-sata cable you need to connect the unit to the esata socket. The unit is also actively cooled by a fan wich is v quiet.......

I have 1 and about to make it 2

Cath

[Philip]

I appreciate this.

Could you direct me to a drive that would work in this unit? And what is this bracket called so i may look for it?

Something like this bracket would do the trick.

http://www.cooldrives.com/essaii3gbexp.html

You will want to make sure you get the internal cables long enough to reach your SATA ports on the motherboard. I ordered my first one too short and had to order a second one.

Works great!

[STORMDAVE]

Seagate is having a bunch of sales right now on their 500GB drives, grab the FreeAgent, it has eSATA/USB and a separate dongle fo FireWire 400. Note the Seagates are kind of big so keep that in mind...the power supply is small too so that's a good thing.

[hdvideo]

I would get an external drive that has both USB and eSATA connectors. They are readily available now. USB will do ok till you get eSATA connectors. Often when you purchase a drive enclosure with eSATA on the the back they will send you a bracket that goes in one of your desktop slots. It plugs into an available onboard SATA port and converts it on the back of your computer to an eSATA connection. Here is an alternative I am looking at right now.

http://www.mwave.com/mwave/viewspec.hmx?scriteria=BA25086&RSKU=BA25086

You just plug a bare drive into it and off you go. Easy swapping in and out of drives. If you upconvert HDV to HQ files then eSATA will be much more capable and workable for you. The above option does not include the small bracket I was telling you about but they can be found online very easily and inexpensively.

Well I Did it. I bought this device and it works fairly well. Although, the problem I am having now is editing is not as fast.

Does anyone know how i could possibly optimize things?

Here is whats happeing: When i edit with a project on this new bare drive in the docking station (its connected to an esata card that i have plugged in to a PCI-X [this is not the same as PCI express] slot) and i make a cut or trim it takes about 2-3 seconds before the action is complete. I can do quick multiple actions like make a cut, deleselt audio from video, select audio, and delete audio all at the same time as long as it does not involve moving the cursor. It pauses for about 3 seconds and then all the actions i performed happens at once. When i do multiple actions sometimes edius crashes.

Playing the video on the timeline is in realtime, the only problem is when i make cuts, trims, or even adding filters and transitions.

This does not happen when i use my internal HDD or two external HDD with firewire. I thought esata was faster than fire wire.

Can anyone help me here?

[Raja]

esata connected HDDs are the same as having a internal HDD, as you are connecting directly to the motherboard. Speed would be the same. I use esata HDDs all the time and have the fastest connection.

Do a diskspeed test. I use the good old rextest. See if the speed is up to spec.

[hdvideo]

Thank you for your help.

I have a call in to tech support for Edius because it only seems to be this one project. I thought it was the drive so i copied all the files on a drive that worked fine before and it did the same thing on that drive. I have other projects on the esata drive and they edit fine.

[GrassValley_KH]

If your motherboard has an Intel Northbridge chipset, I'd strongly suggest that if you haven't updated (or installed) the applicable Intel Matrix Storage driver, do so..

[hdvideo]

Well do give anyone interested an update on my problem here it goes:

First off I realized I only was having difficulty with this one project. So what i ended up doing is Creating a new project, importing the sequence of the old project that i was having difficulty editing and now everything is fine. Must have been a corrupted file but not too corrupted i couldn't use it. Very weird. Now i am editing faster than ever.