[MacDV] Re: Need a hard drive

[richard]

LaCie is merely an integrator, meaning that it is a company which makes a 
case, then installs third party peripherals within the case for sale. They are NOT 
a hard drive manufacturer. This product sounds like a small external IDE RAID 
in a case. They could be using 2@ 200GB and 2 at 250GB to achieve this 
storage. The problem with doing this via Firewire, is that this interface will cap 
the read/write throughput to Firewire 400mbps, which is only a fraction of RAID 
0 performance when installed inside your Mac. Remember as well, that drives 
never quite work out to their full size on the Mac due to some overhead issues 
and occasionally, different ways of defining a megabyte, e.g. the two 200GB 
drives I put inside my Mac worked out at about 376GB for the RAID.

The caveat of RAID 0, which has no redundancy, essentially comes down to 
buying the best possible drives which will not die an early death. Lose one, 
you're done, which then comes to your working habits as to whether it will be 
hours or weeks to get back to your edit. Carefully labeling camera tapes, using 
this labeling in FCP digitizing, making backup copies of your edit to CD's, etc. 
can make for a smooth restoration.

Richard Brown