Preferred hard drives for Apple data copying and storage

[Stephen Pruitt]

Hi all. . .

Looks like we'll be using our Mac for a while more.

I am looking for a good trade off between cost and reliability for hard drive storage/downloading of our film on site and then in editing.

We'll be using a MacBook Pro to serve as our central hub on set and will need to be using Firewire 800 cables to connect drives to our RED's data (both CF cards and RED drives). We'll be daisy-chaining two 1TB drives together and copying to both drives at once from the MacBook Pro. eSata is not an option as far as I can tell using that computer (and I can't afford a new computer). We do double-redundancy, but that is all. No other back-up.

For our last film, we used Western Digital My Book 1TB drives, and while they worked (only one failure), they seem pretty tired and near death.

I would like to know if you can recommend other drives to use for this process. We'll need about 12 of these drives in total (about six TB of total footage, I would guess).

Thanks much.

Stephen

 

[Jay Gannon]

Pretty much exclusively g-tech here, rock solid performance. Very durable, and they have great customer service if your using them in a professional setting.

 

[Jaime Vallés]

Pretty much exclusively g-tech here, rock solid performance. Very durable, and they have great customer service if your using them in a professional setting.

I agree. G-tech rocks.

 

[Tim Wilkinson]

We only use G-tech!!

 

[Jay Gannon]

Hehe Ted's subconscious influence is still strong with us Redusers then

 

[Conrad Hunziker]

I would HIGHLY encourage you to beg, borrow, or steal to be able to use eSATA rather than daisy chained FW800. Your data transfer speeds will slow down to a crawl for all the footage you will pass through the system when using FW800 in this manner. At least get a second FW bus if you must use FW, but then if you can get a second bus, you might as well just go to eSATA,

But dont limit yourself now by purchasing FW-only drives when you may go to eSATA eventually.

 

[Stephen Pruitt]

Hi there R3D. . .

But there is no eSata port on a MacBook Pro. . . and no way to get one, right?

I am, however, looking for eSata-capable drives for use in the big machine.

Thanks guys!

Stephen

 

[Jim McKinney]

A 17" MacBook Pro can take an eSata port in its express card slot.

 

[DCC Erickson]

Sometimes the drives are great and the enclosures are a plastic joke. So if you're not rolling your own, beware "stylish" external drives that can be prone to overheating and have shitty jacks. Your drives might be near death just because of poor ventilation.

 

[Conrad Hunziker]

Hi there R3D. . .
But there is no eSata port on a MacBook Pro. . . and no way to get one, right?

There is. All my MBP's, including the replacement for a dead one that Fedex delivered today, have an ExpressCard32 slot, which you can put either a FW800 card (which gives you a separate FW bus), or an eSATA card.

You can find older 15" ones with ExpressCard32, which are perfectly fine to push data with, or get a new 17". I love screen real estate, so Ive always used the 17".

 

[Chris Parker]

the fact the new mac pros didn't have even ONE faster connection port blew my mind.....in such a bad way.....

and don't get me started on the ZERO upgrade to their PCIe lanes.

go eSATA for now, i agree.

i like GTech (or should I say Hitachi), have tons of 'em. also have tons of LaCie. i've had good and bad drives from several manufacturers over the years.