[MacDV] External Hard Drive Issues & Questions

[Jonathan Warner]

Hi,

I too have a Powerbook G4 (17") and an external firewire Hard drive.  I also
had the problems you are having.  The only way around this was to buy the
"firewire 800 to firewire 400 cable" allowing the drive to work off another
socket to the DV deck (or camera).  I'm not sure if your powerbook has a
firewire 800 socket (as my 17" does) so this advice may not be applicable.




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "William Hofius" <wjh at mac.com>
To: "Macintosh Digital Video List" <MacDV at lists.themacintoshguy.com>
Sent: Sunday, January 25, 2004 7:16 PM
Subject: [MacDV] External Hard Drive Issues & Questions


This is really a two part message. One part trouble-shooting advice,
and one part purchasing advice.

Part One:
I recently purchased a WesternDigital 120GB FireWire & USB 2.0 external
hard drive. My main purpose for buying the drive was to use it to
capture digital video and to use it as a scratch disk for editing
video. I bought it primarily to work with digital video on my 1GHz
PowerBook G4 (so I could take large projects back and forth to work)
but would also use the drive with my 450MHz DP PowerMac G4.

This is a speedy and quite drive and it worked right our of the box
with OS X 10.2.8. (According to the instructions from WesterDigital,
the Mac OS would not recognize the drive until it had been reformatted
for Mac OS. However, the drive was viable from the get-go. I did
reformat the drive to HFS+ though before using it to work with digital
video.)

Because my PowerBook has only one FireWire port, if I am using the
external hard drive, I need to connect the digital video camera to the
second FireWire port on the hard drive.

When I did this, both iMovie 3 and Final Cut Express recognized both
hard drive and camera. From these apps, I could set the drive as the
source for capture and scratch files, save files to the drive, and read
media files from the drive. From these apps, I could control the
camera—play, rewind, fast-forward, stop, pause—and I could view footage
from the camera.

However, in each and every instance I attempted to capture video, each
app would capture a few frames of video and then freeze. The freeze
would be so deep that it would hose the Finder and the only way to
revive the PowerBook was to forced restart.

Is this a problem with the external hard drive? (A cheap FireWire
bridge or controller for example.) Is this an issue with having a
single FireWire port? Is the issue resolvable?

Part Two:
I bought the WesternDigital hard drive because it was cheap. It was on
sale for $219 then came with $100 in rebates. Maybe this was a mistake.

Anyway, I was seeking advice and opinions on external hard drives. I
like the lower prices, larger drive sizes, and faster performance of
the desktop-sized external hard drives. At the same time, I appreciate
the smaller physical sizes and weights of notebook-sized external hard
drives. But these smaller drives are so slow and so expensive!

So what do all of you use for external hard drives? Any recommendations
for a desktop vs notebook? Any drives that have exceptional quality and
reliability? Anything manufacturers or resellers I should avoid like
the black death?

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