iMovie and External Drive - What should I be looking for?
Given the recommendation to store video movies on external disks for space reasons, what should I be considering when choosing such an external disks? Concerned that the disk will slow down my editing, or get annoying delays while using iMovie etc. Suggestions re Fastwire vs. USB (assuming Fastwire is recommended?), Fastwire 800 vs 400 (ie. don't use Fastwire 400 etc.) would be of real value.
I am using 3 Western Digital 1 Terabyte Firewire 800 drives, daisychained together. Performance is very good for iMovie. Only one is used for iMovie, the others are for Time Machine and backup.
Some considerations:
1) External drives are relatively inexpensive these days.
2) Firewire will give you better performance than USB, especially if you have a lot of USB devices attached. If you are capturing video from a USB Camcorder like the new High Definition AVCHD Camcorders, you do not want to be contending for bandwidth on the USB Bus while capturing video.
3) Firewire 800 is best, especially if you are daisychaining (Adding a drive by connecting it to the previous drive). If your computer supports this, use Firewire 800. Most drives you buy will support 800, 400, and USB. Pick 800.
4) If your computer only supports 400, performance is still fine for iMovie. I made a lot of movies on my old iMac, and it was fine. No need to upgrade your computer just to get firewire 800.
5) Some large capacity drives contain everything on one disk (1 set of platters + one set of actuators). Some, on the other hand, use two disks (or multiple disks). If possible, use drives with one disk. This is because a drive with one disk is more reliable. When you put two disks together in one drive, you get the mean time to failure of the one that fails first, which makes both fail if one fails. For example, Western digital sells firewire 800/400/USB/ESATA 1 Terabyte drives that contain 2 drives (the Pro Edition) and also 1 drive (the Studio Edition). Use the Studio Edition if possible.
6) Think of buying drive capacity as giving you only half that capacity as usable space. The other half is for backup. Always backup, preferably to a separate drive.
If you have an older computer with a FireWire port hanging around doing nothing, You can either use it's existing HDD or add another if there isn't ample space. This would be the best most stable solution and will actually add functionality to your current system via IP over FireWire. Currently the Macs seem to have issues with many FW and USB devices directly connected. Personally I no longer use either USB or Firewire connected external enclosures that don't support TCP/IP because they are always hanging or crashing the Finder and other system related apps. You want something that supports TCP/IP protocol through FireWire. IP delivers the data but more importantly there is TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) which keeps track of the data packets.
Either way FireWire would be a better investment but I would avoid any devices that have any buttons or feature controls on the unit itself as these are proven to be the most problematic with Macs.
