video and external hard drives
having decided to edit video regularly, i soon ran into the brick wall of my laptop’s hard drive. i love my laptop. couldn’t believe how well it edits video, but after all my other stuff, including a 12GB partition dedicated solely to system recovery (used it once, and was glad to have it), i only had about 20GB for video. considering one of my projects has 12–13 hours of raw tape, i found myself just avoiding. my network storage server and two spare 80GB drives i’d swap in and out of my desktop are mostly full of music and backups. using ethernet/wireless connections, they aren’t reliable for capturing or editing video — only for backups (slow).
years ago i bought a storage server for video surveillance, because i could keep it in a ~900 lb gun safe, preventing thieves/vandals from walking off with evidence. i spent a helluva a lot of money for a RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives) model and set it up in 80GB RAID 1 mode, meaning everything it stored was mirrored on a separate drive, allowing operation and data preservation even if one drive failed. went through hell with that, doing the usual busywork diversion dance with techs who’d rather convert you into a field engineer than admit the unit’s demented and replace it. my third snap server 2200 was the charm, and it’s been a peach ever since. would never buy another though. dinosaur, with sorry customer service.
after hours of researching the latest in external drives, i was discouraged. seemed every major brand less than $500 had users reporting failure within weeks or months. so i kept trying to swap around spare internal drives and keep up with my growing mountain of data and backups. and there was another problem, which i hope this post will address adequately for others in the same situation.
my largest data storage need is for video editing. my laptop (primary computer) has an arsenal of wonderful ports, but only one firewire (400 Mbits/sec). firewire even sounds fast, and for years it blew away USB. i’d also heard that firewire 400 often ends up being faster than USB 2.0, rated at 480. not having any experience, i assumed a firewire external drive was a must for capturing and editing video, but then i was wondering what would happen if i had to daisy chain my vidcam through the drive; during capture, the same firewire cable would need to handle 2x the data, sending the video from the camcorder, and back out to the hard drive. because the camera doesn’t slow down, that pipe needs to flow and keep up.
what decided it for me were a couple of cool dudes at Best Buy. they encouraged me to buy everything i thought i needed, and simply return what didn’t work for me. i hate doing that to businesses (BTW, piss on all you fuckwad “artistes” who use such policies to borrow and devalue new gear with no intention of ever keeping it), but if they encourage it, great. so i bought this gizmo (320GB WD My Book Premium), threw down $70 for 2 firewire cables that would fit my camera and laptop, and began to experiment.
didn’t take long to find that the USB on this thing kicks. it captured video perfectly, and edited the same. didn’t even open the firewire cable packages. took them back to the store for credit on a 250GB My Book, this time without firewire.
see that’s the thing about these huge drives. one sounds like plenty, but unless you want to recapture all that video from the source tapes, you’re smoking crack if you don’t get buy them in pairs to have one as a backup. for me, the diff between the 320GB and 250GB is perfect, because i’ll use the larger one to back up my laptop (no need to back up that backup unless it’s stored at another location in case of fire, theft, etc.).
still shocks me that i spent $109 and walked out with a 250GB hard drive that kicks ass 20 seconds after first plugging it into my laptop. sweet! of course, it could fail tomorrow, but i doubt both new drives will fail together. what’s my option otherwise? i did consider buying two different brands, but these gizmos are so sweet, it didn’t seem worth taking a chance on another. all the complaints about noise i read on amazon.com must have been for some older version or something. after two days of use, i couldn’t tell you if these even have fans. if they do, it’s drowned out by the fan on my desktop power supply.
[NOTE: if i have trouble with either of these drives later, i'll return and update this post at the bottom. FWIW, i just removed from my desktop a 420MB western digital drive that had been spinning almost continuously since 1994; wasn't worth taking up a slot anymore, though it worked as well as ever. hard to believe hard drives last even a few years, IMO, but they usually do far better than that.]
important
here’s some advice before you buy a My Book for your windows computer and load it with data. the My Book’s formatted FAT32 out of the box. i recommend deleting the FAT32 partition and creating a new NTFS. since the drive worked well with video, i had figured leave well enough alone. then i tried to use windows backup and it coughed once the backup file hit 4GB. oops. no problem; follow these directions (though you might want to do the full format instead of the quick format). for those unfamiliar with disk management in windows XP… well, i was going to tell you exactly how to get there, but my computer is set up old school, since i bought XP only under protest. hang on… okay, this should help. just remember that deleting a partition and creating a new one wipes out all data on the disk.
haven’t tested it scientifically, but it seems that the speed of my My Books falls when reading/writing with each other (dogged USB, i assume), compared to the blistering speed when writing from the laptop hard drive to only one of them. for that reason, i recommend not assuming that a USB external hard drive would hold up capturing from a USB camcorder (two high-speed ops on same USB system). i don’t know, but i’d be skeptical. my situation, using firewire for the camcorder and USB for the drive, is seamless.
review:
- both the premium and essential editions of My Book have a bitchin’ USB interface that works well writing firewire output sent to the PC and editing the result. in my setup, i don’t need to connect the drives via firewire.
- my testing indicates that single-system USB suffers during concurrent high-speed transfers (e.g., capturing video to one drive while another’s reading/writing). don’t know whether firewire acts the same, but as long as i leave the system free during video captures, i’m okay with USB.
- the My Book ships with FAT32, and that works well enough, except you can’t store files 4GB or larger. if you’re a windows dude, format as NTFS before putting on anything. BTW, i don’t have any plans to move these drives to other computers, but if you want yours freely mobile, consider testing whether removing the preinstalled drivers prevents an easy plug and play on a strange computer.
- as with any storage device, ask yourself how disturbed you’d be to wake up one random morning and find all your data gone or inaccessible. if the answer is “damned disturbed”, you need a realistic, tested backup strategy. most people buying a large external drive should consider buying two.