External hard drive with Firewire- which is the best for about 150 dollars?

Could anyone please help me in finding a reliable fast external hard drive for my iMac OSX 10.7.5, 16 GB, where I plan to put my FCP Events while working on my iMacdrive in my FCP Projects.

I'm going a bit nuts by surfing the internet reading hundreds of reviews about hard drives with Firewire 800 (Thunderbolt is really too expensive for me at this moment).
So I checked Western digital, G-tech or LaCie drives with 2 or 3 TB, firewire and maybe usb3 (not necessary, i plan to use firewire). For instance

* LaCie d2 Quadra USB 3.0 (which -as some say- goes to sleep very deep.. without ever waking up, and if waking up, your Finder crashes; others say it's just great)

* Western Digital My Book Studio 2TB

Could anyone please give a good recommendation? I'm planning too spend about 150-200 euro max. Thank you so much, I've seen too many contradicting reviews for now...

Sorry I can't help between those specific drives. I use a Western Digital Mybook Studio II 2TB raid and what I like most about it is that it's very quiet.

I noticed you mention a worry of the LaCie going to sleep. I'm not sure about the 2TB MyBook Studio but the MyBook Studio II raid also goes to sleep a lot. I use Disksomnia to keep it awake.

www.digital-heaven.co.uk/disksomnia

It works by regularly writing a very small invisible file to the disk tricking it into not sleeping. Simple and effective.

Thank you for your quick response! Maybe I should consider a raid also (for a back up), even if more expensive.. also thanks for the disksomnia tip..

Here's a wee heads up. If your thinking about the WD MyBook Studio II raid and running it as Raid 1 there's a little problem. It comes configured as Raid 0 and you need to use the WD Drive Manager to change it to Raid 1. But unless WD has fixed it since I last checked the drive manager won't instal on OSX Lion or later.

I found something on the net ages ago about a workaround to get it to happen, but I have looked since and wasn't able to find it again.

Okay, thanks again... I'll look it up when I'll buy one!!

I should have probably done this before posting, I just checked and they did update it at some point, just installed and it runs fine.

support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=114&sid=62

Thank you so much again for your help. I'll probably buy one!

I use a WD My Book Studio 1TB - Firewire800 for my FCPX drive and it works great. It does go to sleep when not used and has occasionally dismounted its self but never during editing. I measured the read/write speed and it is approx 72MB/s which is twice as fast as my USB2 back-up drive.

I thought a comparison might be useful to anyone stumbling across this at a later date. I'm getting around 110MB/s with the MyBook Studio II 2TB Raid 0 also through Firewire 800.

Thanks for the input.. actually, now I'm at a point of buying a G-Technology drive (that's what Larry Jordon advised me by mail) ... oh oh, why don't they just make one for each price level that works perfectly?? :S

One thing to add about the disk sleep... My G-Raid drive would sleep just fine under Lion. With Mountain Lion, it would never go to sleep even when I'd put the Mac to sleep. No amount of fiddling with the system power preferences or pmset utility would fix it. Then after a recent Mountain Lion update (2-3 months ago?) the drive magically started to sleep properly again.

So you might want to go without Disksomnia and see if that was the root cause.

Now speaking of sleep, I wish FCPx would assert the "don't sleep" permission while it does a background render. Hate it when I walk away and forget to hit the Caffeine button then return a couple hours later to a sleeping machine without the rendered output.

The problem I had was that the disc was constantly going to sleep, which is a major pain while editing. It turned out the WD Raid has some sleep technology built into its firmware, no OSX setting can override that. That's where Discsomnia comes in to keep it awake.

It sleeps perfectly well on Mountain Lion for general purpose computer use, as with Discsomnia I can chose to only force it to stay awake when certain chosen apps, such as FCPX, are running.

When I got it I was all geared up to get a G-Tech Raid when, last minute, someone told me they are really noisy, so I went with the WD.

Dave,

NocoDave wrote: The problem I had was that the disc was constantly going to sleep, which is a major pain while editing. It turned out the WD Raid has some sleep technology built into its firmware, no OSX setting can override that. That's where Discsomnia comes in to keep it awake.

It sleeps perfectly well on Mountain Lion for general purpose computer use, as with Discsomnia I can chose to only force it to stay awake when certain chosen apps, such as FCPX, are running.

I was just about to start a new thread about purposely putting an internal disk to sleep, and then ran across your post.

I plan to remove the superdrive from my 2011 MBP i7 and replace it with a "Seagate 750GB Momentus XT Solid-State Hybrid Hard Drive" or similar. Then, it would be a dedicated media drive when I'm away and can't take an external RAID with me. (No more excuses for not getting editing done.)

My issue would be that this drive would always be in and running using battery and making noise and the time using it for editing would be small compared to the time "not" using it for editing. Since I also use the MBP as my Logic recording studio, I also don't want extra HDD noise when recording with a sensitive condenser mic.

So...

Will the Discsomnia software do what I want and put the drive to sleep when I'm not using it?

Thanks,
Dave

Sorry Dave, it's not going to do that for you. You have it the wrong way round. If an HD such as mine has the firmware set to put it to sleep after 1 minute without use, but you want to keep it awake, that's where disksomnia comes in.

As you can imagine, while editing and the NLE isn't accessing the drive for over a minute it goes to sleep, then when it want to access it you get beach balls and have to wait for it to waken up. It gets very tedious.

So Disksomnia writes an invisible text file to the drive every 55 seconds, that way it always stays awake and there's no interruptions to editing.

Hold on:

I plan to remove the superdrive from my 2011 MBP i7 and replace it with a "Seagate 750GB Momentus XT Solid-State Hybrid Hard Drive" or similar. Then, it would be a dedicated media drive when I'm away and can't take an external RAID with me. (No more excuses for not getting editing done.)

Do you mean use the superdrive in a caddy as a media drive or the internal solid state?

I answered above thinking you meant the superdrive in an external caddy as a media drive. But now I'm not sure it's what you mean. I've never worked with solid state drives as such, but if that's what you mean isn't the point that they don't need to sleep as they don't spin? If so you shouldn't need to worry.

Actually, I just noticed you say "Hybrid". I have no idea how you would work with one of these in relation to sleeping/awakening. Sorry

"Sorry Dave, it's not going to do that for you. You have it the wrong way round. If an HD such as mine has the firmware set to put it to sleep after 1 minute without use, but you want to keep it awake, that's where disksomnia comes in."

Okay, cool. I was hoping it went both ways.

Thanks,
Dave

Dave,

Yes, I would remove the SuperDrive and put it in an external enclosure and replace it with a drive.

You are correct, this is a hybrid drive and not a straight SSD. I still can't afford those. This is the drive-
www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/834410-RE...tml#pr-header-834410

Thanks,
Dave

No one has published how these hybrids work with video editing. They are also a 24/7 device, moving files non-stop from the HDD to/from the SSD. No one has published how these work with sleep modes, either. Since SSDs don't sleep, would it ever matter? And with the constant file swapping they do, will it actually slow down video editing?

They are also a 24/7 device, moving files non-stop from the HDD to/from the SSD.

That was the first thing that came to my mind, just how much alive are they and is putting them to sleep realistic. I'm still on the old fashioned HDD's but initially I can't really see any advantage to the hybrid for video editing over an SSD system drive with an HHD media raid.

Maybe just a compromise for use in laptops to get the best of both in there.