upgrading hard drive for video?

I need a hard drive that can be dedicated to digital video and have

been considering the Maxtor 80GB. I'm leaning towards the external

firewire model so I can load film from my Canon GL1 directly into the

driver... my husband insists on the internal model. I'm looking for

some feedback on the pros & cons...

Anne

You might want to search through the archives at www.vidpro.org for information about hard drives for digital video.

 

Good luck.

If your choice is purely between the internal 5400 RPM ATA-100 drive and the external 5400 RPM IEEE-1394 drive, then just buy whichever you can get the best price on. They are exactly the same drive, except that the external has a case, a power supply, and a 1394<->ATA translator (and is thus likely to be more expensive). The only advantage of the external is that you could pick it up and easily take it to another computer.

 

You didn't mention the type of system you have or what you intend to do with it. If you are going to edit video with any sort of frequency, a 5400 RPM drive will be too slow for all but the most patient users. You could get better results by making a RAID array of two or more of these drives, and much better results by using two or more 7200 or 10000 RPM drives on a SCSI bus. The SCSI bus is still the most capable of any reasonably-priced storage bus.

 

For reference, I use two 10,000 RPM SCSI drives on an Ultra2 SCSI bus, configured as RAID level 0 for high speed and poor reliability. This setup delivers about 50 MBytes/second in sequential transfer, which is just enough to saturate the IEEE-1394 bus while leaving 30 MBytes/second of headroom on the SCSI bus for the system drive.

 

You can find performance information for almost every hard drive in current production at http://www.storagereview.com/ and of course http://www.pricewatch.com/ lists competitive hard drive prices. Please reply and tell us what kind of computer you use and what you use it for.

Jeff, thanks for getting back to me. I'm using a PC/PentII/Win98/128MB/ I trying to upgrade/build a system for editing video-for personal use and to complement our website (wildlife photography with brief clips capturing wildlife behavior, sound etc). The more questions I ask the more confusing it gets! I've been working with the video editing program that came preinstalled (AsymetricDV50). Oh, I have Adobe Premier 5.0 but haven't installed it yet.

I've had trouble capturing from a Canon GL-1 to any 5400 RPM drives. I get tons of dropped frames, or the capture application won't run at all. I've had no trouble at all capturing to a 20GB 7200 RPM.

 

Bill

I wouldn't recommend getting a single large IDE drive, as they have slow transfer rates (when spinning at 5400, there sometimes is not enough throughput which gives dropped frames). Instead, purchase 2 drives, and get a IDE RAID card (www.promise.com). Or, if you run windows NT or Windows 2000, you don't need an extra card as it can do software raid (if you dual boot, then I'd get the IDE RAID card).

 

I'm running 2 15GB (7200 RPM). maxtor drives with a promise RAID card, and I get around 30MB/sec throughput, enough to do whatever I need to do. IDE RAID is a cost effective way to get excellent performance.

 

Brian

Just because the drive is firewire doesn't mean that you can just hook up your camcorder to the drive, hit "play" and have the stuff recorded on the drive. You'll need to "capture" your digital video onto your drive with an editing application.

 

Inputting onto the drive is easy. Most modern IDE ATA100 drives will capture DV data rates. Output back to tape, however is another story. Reading data from your editing app, assembling all the little pieces that make up your video (including dissolves, effects and stuff) and streaming it out the pipe back to the camera (or deck) is MUCH harder for the system. "Read" performance is where it's at, not "Write" performance. For adequate output, you need a RAID array of two or more drives working in parallel. Yes, you can do it with one, if you're lucky. But editing is tough enough without the frustrations of dropped frames and other problems.