Digital Video - July 2008 - (Page 36) DOLLARS & DRIVES STORAGE In general, I’ve made a habit of paying the extra few dollars to buy drives with both USB 2.0 and FireWire 400. As mentioned above, FireWire tends to be faster on Mac systems, although rumors abound that its days are numbered, especially in light of new systems such as the MacBook Air, which offer strictly USB 2.0. FireWire 800, with its faster pipeline, is also worth the few extra dollars if your system has a capable port. The current trend is to include a FW800 port LaCie 2Big with an adaptor that lets the drive also be used with FW400. This has the advantage of more flexibility and cheaper prices than older drives featuring separate ports. If your system is more than five years old, you’ll probably want to opt for FireWire since the older USB 1.0 spec is not fast enough for video work. The best for speed is eSATA, and it’s increasingly become an option with off-the-shelf external drives that also feature USB 2.0 and possibly even FireWire. Few systems include eSATA out of the box, but expansion cards for both laptops and desktops are plentiful and reasonably cheap. If your editing needs require uncompressed video, eSATA is where it’s at, especially with inexpensive RAID setups. KNOW YOUR WORKFLOW Which setup is right for you? SAS is best for single seat editing systems and could be assembled by most power users. A distributed work system indicates a need for Fibre Channel or iSCSI. Such LaCie Quadra NAS/SAN solutions should be considered only with the recommendation of an IT professional after analysis of your operational needs and data flow. — Wayne Cole OFF-THE-BEATEN-PATH OPTIONS Such companies as MCE have started to offer creative options for video-making road warriors. Seventeen-inch MacBook Pro users now have the option to replace both their optical drive and internal hard drive with two 500GB SATA drives, which can then be striped in a whopping 1TB RAID array. That gives editors in the field almost 80 hours of DV25 media (allowing room for the system and applications) and the option to move around wirelessly before they’d need to rely on external media. MCE’s kit includes an external case for your optical drive so you don’t lose the ability to install new software or burn DVDs of edits in progress. The roomy storSeagate FreeAgent Desktop age does come at a premium, since it’s one of the more expensive options on the buyer’s guide. For the sake of completeness, I’ve included one NAS (network-attached storage) option from Netgear. Gigabit Ethernet isn’t ideally suited for video work, but for small to medium-sized shops, having such a drive on-hand makes accessing shared video, sound effects, graphics files and more a snap. If off-the-shelf NAS is too expensive for your small shop, there are also other options, such as Apple’s Airport Extreme wireless router. It includes a USB 2.0 port, meaning you can jack in a cheap, big-capacity drive (just about any of the drives listed here will work) and share its contents with other systems in your network, be they wired or wireless. SHOPPING FOR YOUR NEXT DRIVE As I mentioned earlier, big-box retailers stock a wide variety of external drives and frequently discount them with weekly sales, making them a great way to bulk up your storage needs on a budget. Enroll in reward programs and you can save even more at places like Best Buy, and when new models are announced, hit your local stores for heavily discounted prices on last year’s model. Online retailers such as OWC may not be able to beat your local brick-and-mortar store on price, but they offer a wide variety of storage options aimed at pros and prosumers alike. Their cases and components are often of higher quality than the mass-produced stuff found locally, so a few extra bucks spent now makes a good investment in the long run. It’s really a buyer’s market today — the retail prices noted here are the most you’ll pay, but it’s worth the modest extra effort to do some price matching online prior to making your final decision. DV 36 dv july 2008 www.dv.com http://www.dv.com
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