I'm looking at purchasing an external hard drive to store my video files on. I was wondering what experience people have had with different drives so I go with the most reliable brand. My ideal hard drive would have Firewire, about 250 GB, and costs no more than $200. Any suggestions.

I think you're right about on target with the price and capacity there. Shop around. You might find up to 300Gb for that price.

LaCie is generally considered the best. This is true, they do rock... UNTIL they don't. When a LaCie goes bad, it goes really bad. My advice: get a LaCie d2 and treat it like a chunk of unstable plutonium. Always unmount it, always turn it off, never so much as touch it while it's running.

I'm not saying these drives are fragile, they're just less forgiving. They are fast, strong, and well recommended, just less forgiving in my experience.

Since LaCie drives are less forgiving, would it be better to get an extended warranty on the hard drive? Just so I don't have to pay for a replacement drive should something go wrong.

LaCies are horrible! Don't use them. I've had 3 500gb drives of their die on me. (all full of media)

Get GRAIDs - they are certainly the best. I've never had them die on me.

Ouch! Chris, that sucks.

See, it's weird. I hear a lot of bad stuff about them, and I've had one go nuts and start corrupting files once (a wipe fixed it) but they still have such a good reputation.

I'm going to check out these GRAIDs you speak of. I'm in the market for a new one.

GRAIDs are wonderful. I think it's actually G-RAID.

They're rock solid - and they look just like a G5 tower to boot.

-Chris
Studentfilms.com

seagate is solid

I've owned and worked with at least half a dozen LaCie drives and have never had a problem, including two older 80GB models that were used as scratch disks in the media lab of a very ghetto high school - for five or more years.

I'm not saying that no one has ever had a problem, but consider that the housings are all that each manufacturer really makes. There is a certain likelihood of problems with a given bare drive model, regardless of whether the case says G-RAID (their stuff is really quite expensive) or LaCie.

I think an FW800 d2 would fit the bill and not bust your budget.

Anything Lacie under 250 gigs is fine...it's the BigDisks that have tanked on me. I have a 120gig Lacie that is still alive and kicking - I should have clarified.

-Chris
Studentfilms.com

I'm scared to own a hard drive bigger than about 200-300 GB. It's just too much data in one place. I've got a 300GB Seagate, but it's all backups and I hardly ever turn it on.

I agree with titanium. Redundancy is good.

All of my LaCies are 160 GB or less. I've used a 250 GB occasionally without problems.

The Big Disks aren't particularly well-priced, either. With an internal drive there's an obvious motivation to maybe spend more per GB and get a higher capacity (limited drive bays), but with external FW drives that lose virtually no speed even when daisy chained, I can't see spending that much. Can you even use the Big Disk as a RAID?

Luckily none of my projects (on film) will generate more than an hour of footage, so I have way too much room for standard def miniDV. OTOH, I've recently started working in 10 bit - 17.5 GB for 11 minutes of footage

I will probably end up going with a LaCie D2 160 GB or a 250 GB, and just get a warranty on it, I realize that if it breaks I still lose my data, but at least I can save money on a replacement drive should something go wrong. Thanks for all the great info.

I'm about to cut a film with 12 hours of footage in HDV, and I very much wanted to use Apple Intermediate, but the storage needs would be astronomical (on the order of 500GB). I may end up offlining it, and pulling the footage in for the final cut, but the tapes and capture deck are 200 miles way, and that means two trips. Argh! Hard drives! I just don't want to buy one that big.

You don't have around 500 GB total capacity between several drives?

I'd recommend viewing the footage and trying to cut back the amount you have to import and convert... surely it can't be all 12 hours.

I've got nearly 1 TB on all my drives, but the they're mostly full. I may buy another 200GB or so, and try to spread it out. We'll see.

I _might_ be able to cut down on how much needs to be imported, but the people in charge of tapes did a really sloppy (read: non existent) job logging while we were shooting, and it would be a lot of work. I'm going to make a new post about editing Apple Intermediate vs. HDV.

I'd never heard of G-Tech before reading this thread, but afterwards I think I'm going to go with a 250gb external from them when I purchase my MacBook Pro. Great stuff!

I don't need things to match, just to function but having the hard drive match the MacBook is just plain cool.

-Kegan