western digital passport ext hd

[jimstamos]

anyone used these. am working out of town with my laptop and was going to load up footage on one. powered thru the usb, but theyre 5400. will they still transfer fast enough for edting/
jim

[STORMDAVE]

Sure, but what do you plan to do? You'll get around 25MB/sec from those drives running via USB2.0. DV will be easy...Canopus HQ, maybe one or two layers. HDV should be ok, but drive speed kind of matters with MPEG2 because it's Long GOP unlike DV.

[Fred Dwyer]

Seems like big bucks, hope it's a big drive. I just picked up a Western Digital My Book, 500GB USB2 for $149.00 at Staples.

[STORMDAVE]

But those require external power while laptop drives use power from the USB port. Very good for on the road editing if you have a bigger laptop battery. If you're in a vehicle you can just run power off the cigarette lighter for the laptop and the HD will eat the power from the laptop.

Here's a cool little 1TB drive at RAID0. From reading the specs, if you use FireWire 400 or 800, you don't need to use the AC adapter, but for USB2.0 and eSATA you need to use the AC adapter.

[Fred Dwyer]

Of course. How stupid of me. Since I don't use laptops it never occured to me. Isn't it amazing how casually we accept drives rated in Terabytes now? My first PC with an internal hard drive (IBM XT) had a huge 10 megabyte drive. Who could ever need more? Let us know how you like the Passport.