Best External Hard Drives on a Budget

Hi All,

I have read a couple replies throughout the forum on how you should edit on an external hard drive rather than the internal hard drive. I am now looking for the best external hard drive whilst keeping within a budget of 150US. Do you'll have any recommendations on which hard drives are the best for good performance in video editing (Final Cut X)?

Thanks

Depends somewhat on the type of footage you are editing. A firewire 800 drive (7200 rpm) is decent for SD and 720 HD, but 1080 footage pushes its' limit. I would suggest an external eSata drive if you have a sata controller in your computer. Avoid any type of USB drive. $150 budget is not going to get you a very large drive.

Hmm..dgwvideo..I'll be editing 1080 hacked gh2 footage. But that tops out at around 19MB's a second. I just bought a 1TB G-Drive 7200 FW 800 on amazon for $172. The G-Drive can do around 75+MB's per second. Do you think this is solid enough?

Granted I'd like to have eSata, but spending another $200 or so on adding it to my 27in iMac is not going to happen anytime soon.

I wonder if a manufacturer will build an eSata to Thunderbolt adapter or something...but I'm kinda skeptical of that happening soon.

Cleash - Check out OWC and G-Drive's, both use Hitachi Drives and have solid reviews and reliability.

If you can stretch your budget a bit I can recommend the firewire 800, Western Digital My Book Studio II, Raid 0 as a budget drive, but to a certain extent.

www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-My-Book-Studio/dp/B0016P7H3Q

It's only to a certain extent as I have no point of reference, I got it while finding out if the move to Mac and FCPX was right for me, I never wanted to splash out too much money finding out and had never worked from an external drive before, I worked with internal eSata Raid 0 for ages before this.

It's a bit of a cheap plastic case and that was a bit of a worry, but was advertised as low noise, so I gave it a shot.

It's cheap for what it is, it's very quiet and I never drop frames due to hard disk performance in FCPX, but I haven't done any multi cam as yet. I always work with Optimized media, and very occasionally have to revert to switching to and from Proxy media, but so far only when compositing complex motion generators with video and titles in compound clips.

I have monitored how it goes working with original, Long GOP, media and and it goes fine for straight editing on a Storyline but as soon as I add a connected clip or 2 there are issues, but this might be more related to the following.

I'm only running the basic i5 21.5inc mid 2011 iMac, but bumped up to 12GB Ram.

I've been quite impressed with the drive, and the basic iMac come to think about it.

OWC drives are great as well as the G-drives you speak about. Still, 800 mbps (1394B) will deliver a bit sluggish performance for most HD streaming, especially if you have multiple layers. When I attempt to edit 720 24P footage with 6 or 7 streams, layers, etc. and reference them from a FW800 drive, it's not always smooth. But you can adjust some preferences for better performance and edit with proxy media to make the most of it.

It can be done and made to work, just don't expect your editing experience to be the same as it would with a sata 1 or 2 series drive.

PS...$179 is a pretty good price for that 1TB drive. Note that 1 TB is still relatively small if you plan to store multiple 1080 projects on it. And if you leave the recommended 15% free space always available on it, you're down to 850GB. For a scratch drive used only for editing it is typically more than enough for all but the largest of projects.

I should have added to that last post. I work with 1920x1080 24p, 25p and 30p footage, but have checked out 50i and 60i a bit too.

Addition:

I just had a thought, it would stretch your budget more than that. Working with Raid 0 you'd need a backup drive too, but a cheaper USB drive would do.

Yeah, I hear yah. $179 was solid. Thought about the 2 TB but it wasn't has fast as the 1TB. The smaller the drive, the less time it's searching for data.

I'll do a layer or two, but with FCPX the Proxy and Optimize are nice to work off of. In case I need multiple streams/layers. Then revert to Optimize to render out.

When I run out of room, that 1 TB will be a bit cheaper. Plus I may jump over to OWC. Big fan of there Ram, and now since this forum I've found folks who use there HDs. Plus who knows maybe more thunderbolt drives will be released.

Thanks...I have a Macbook Pro 13" but I find my hard drive space on my internal HD is going really fast! I think it is because I trans-code the videos to apple pro res 422 prior to editing.

Thank you...using the optimized media takes up alot of storage for me, seeing that I only have an internal HD for now. I will look at your recommendation as well.

You will simply have to buy an external 7200rpm FW800 drive. No other choice. This is a professional app, it requires a professional setup. Not to be harsh, but the reality is "minimum specs mean minimum performance" for any software.

Optimized ProRes are "normal" size files. What you're working with are smaller than "normal", highly compressed, process intensive files.

Well put, BenB...and I can attest to the minimum specs/performance issue. When Apple released Color I attempted to use it on my aged PPPC G5, and well..it ran, but like a dog. It was basically unusable. Motion also, while meeting minimum specs ran so slow and paused that it was unusable. As for minimum specs in general, most manufacturers also add a "recommended' spec, which is over and above the minimum, and I have found that often times the recommended spec was in fact the minimum useable spec of a particular application, device
or machine.

Ok what are the recommended specs to run Final Cut Pro X and Motion 5...Currently, I have a 13" MacBook Pro with a 500GB HD (7200rpm), 8GB Ram and 2.3 i5 processor.

Take a look at the G-Tech drives, only had good experience which we never had from LaCie. :evil:
Check out the list...

Max out the RAM. Again OWC has best quality, prices, customer support.

cleash wrote: Ok what are the recommended specs to run Final Cut Pro X and Motion 5...Currently, I have a 13" MacBook Pro with a 500GB HD (7200rpm), 8GB Ram and 2.3 i5 processor.

Here are the minimum, MINIMUM specs from Apple.
Anything you can do above and beyond, especially RAM and FAST DRIVES for media will help significantly.
www.apple.com/finalcutpro/specs/

Thanks everyone! I think I will buy this drive:

www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/818374-RE...mini_High_Speed.html

What you'll think?

That's a pretty decent drive. I think you'll be satisfied. Remember, even FW800 will lag with HD video that has many layers, effects, etc. but it is by far a better solution than using your system drive for media.

Hmm so the only way to avoid any lag is wait for the market to get some thunderbolt HDs.

The other factor is the GPU in that 13" which is min spec, too. There are T'Bolt drives on the market, but don't expect prices to come down too much as they're all RAID drives. You'd not see enough performance increase on a single drive for T'bolt to be worth it.

So true! But the price of the 15" is so expensive! I cannot afford the 15" now. My only option is the Imac or Macbook pro 13". I choose the Macbook pro for portability but I am seeing where the iMac would of probably helped with the higher horsepower! BTW do you know anywhere that has Macbook Pros 15" cheaper than apple's website?