storage options

okay this is annoying. I'm trying to edit a video podcast and I've run out of room on BOTH of my hard drives. I need a storage solution.

What do you all recommend? What's the quickest and most cost-effective way to add a couple of hundred Gb?

Comments

[william dutton]

is it a desktop or a laptop?

if laptop, does it have firewire?

yes, grab a firewire hdd cage and wack a big hard drive in it, else

grab a usb hdd cage and wack a big hard drive in it.

desktop, add more drives.

[Phillip Molly Malone]

Go down to MSY and you can add 250gb via USB for about 185 dollars. The 250gb drive is 135. Bigger drives are available. You could buy a bigger drive then you have and ghost your current drive or just buy a USB Caddy for your existing drive.

Molly

[Garth Kidd]

Get some VC money and buy a low end NetApp storage array configured as a file server. It'll be the loudest and most expensive piece of computer equipment you ever bought, but it'll flatly refuse to let your data get damaged nomatter what the individual hard disk drives do, up to and including two of them failing at once. It'll also let you pull your data back out of the fire if you stuff-up or your cat accidentally hits the "delete everything" key. For about the same cost as a good backup drive, you can get started with four drives, adding one at a time as your needs increase. Double the money and add a little, and you can put another one in your colocation facility underneath your web servers and set up DR relationships between the two.

I work for the company, of course, so I might be biased.

[Phillip Molly Malone]

Hey Garth,
What if there is a firer?
Molly

[Rob Irwin]

Molly, an external USB drive is going to be rooted for working with video -- as Cam will probably end up doing from it. It needs to be Firewire. Last time I neede space, I bought an external firewire housing and just dropped a HDD of my choosing into it. Worked great.

[Cameron Reilly]

Rob, what about this:
Quality External 5.25” USB 2.0+1394 Combo IDE HDD Enclosure $55 “Suitable For High Speed IDE HDD”

Is that the kind of cage I'm looking for? You're right that video will be a key use and I need it to work connect to both the desktop and the laptop by firewire.

[Cameron Reilly]

and then stick one of these in it:
300GB Maxtor 16MB Cache 7200rpm SATA Hard Disk Drive $168
??

[swylie]

The problem with using FireWire for a video drive is that you reduce the bandwidth available to the DV device you're capturing from, so you can sometimes end up with dropped frames etc - most editing software will come with documentation that adivses against using more than one FireWire device at any time - with particular reference to capturing video from DV devices...

USB2.0 is a pretty good option though - although I've found a couple of those cheap external HDD cases to be unreliable - I'd prefer to buy a LaCie or Maxtor external drive for the quality - despite the extra cost.

I particularly love the value of the LaCie Extreme Drives range - LaCie 1TB BiggerDisk Extreme 7200rpm (USB2.0&FireWire&F800) $1119.00... mmmm....

[Cameron Reilly]

Steve, I'm thinking about just chucking my backups onto the external drive and using the onboard hdd's for the actual editing. That make sense?

[Rob Irwin]

Yep, that cage sounds spot on. I paid a bit under $100 for mine but that was a year or so ago and I didn't bargain hunt too much (did you use Static Ice?), so I'm sure $55 will be a decent unit. You then just toss in a suitable IDE drive, and you're away.

These things are so simple. You unscrew the box, and there's an IDE connector inside. You plug in the HDD and screw the box back together. Power it up, plug it into your PC and XP says, "Hey, you have a new device. Cool..." and, before you know it, you have a new drive in your drive tree. Piece of piss.

[Phillip Molly Malone]

When I say USB, I mean USB2, I am just lazy like that. From everyone I talk to, they tell me that USB 2 is quicker then Firewire. Not sure if this is true or not and to be honest, haven't got any money to buy new hardware so no point finding out right now.

Molly

[william dutton]

usb2 can be quicker in bursts, but firewire is faster overall. another good point to add is that you can buy usb2 hdd cages which have really crappy sending rates so it would be best to use it for backup storage. if you want to read a bit more from a atomic magazine writer,

http://www.dansdata.com/usbadapt.htm
also another good article about usb cage deaths
http://www.dansdata.com/gz055.htm

william