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Mallrat · Feb 20, 2002, 10:33 PM

Hello--
I want to find out a few things about hard drives for editing video with an apple G4 and Final Cut Pro 3.0

A few questions;

� What is Oxford 911? And how do you know if a harddrive has this? Any examples of ones that do?

� For what I've read SCSI hard drives are better than Firewire. Is this true? Firewire is so much cheaper... will it get the job done? I want to edit feature films, probably not a lot of special effects.

� Is internal harddrives faster than external?

� I read about RAIDs.... what exactly are they? And is buying a few firewire drives, and hooking them up together kind of a make shift hard drive...

Thanks for your help.

Paul S · Feb 21, 2002, 11:27 AM

FireWire hard drives are nothing more than IDE drives in an external case with a bridge chip. The Oxford 911 is that bridge between IDE and FW. That is the newest, fastest bridge chip available. Drives will now sustain around 35MB/s as opposed to the 12-14MB/s older bridges would give. Digital Video requires about 3.9MB/s to you won't have any problem.

Most companies are now using the 911 chip. LaCie, OWC, newer Maxtor's and Western Digital's FW drives, etc. Most companies advertise that they have it, or it's at least on their spec page.

SCSI is better than FW in terms of potential speed. The fastest SCSI controllers go up to 320MB/s channels, while FW is only 50MB/s. SCSI drives go up to 15,000 rpm while IDE tops out at 7200 rpm. Does that make it better for video? I think that's a matter of opinion. FW or IDE is more than fast enough to handle it. I do a ton of video work myself and have done it all IDE and/or FW. FW is so much cheaper that I think it's not worth the extra money for SCSI.

For internals, it depends. SCSI internals could be faster than FW as stated above. IDE drives usually sustain about 35MB/s and peak at 40-45MB/s, so they fall in the range of the FW drives for sustained output. There is not too much of a difference since they use the same IDE drives, it's just a different way of connecting them. I've gone mostly internal IDE because it's so cheap, and at the time, the Oxford 911 wasn't out so there was a substantial speed difference. From now on, I'll be going FW.

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. It can be set up in many ways. The 2 most common are Mirror which keeps a constant duplicate of one drive on another. This is more for backups and server applications for data. The other is Striping, where 2 drives are made to work as one. Data is alternately written to one drive then the other to maximize speed. It's read as one file. The downside is, when one drive dies, all your data is effectively lost because only half of any given file exists on the other drive.

PeteWK · Feb 21, 2002, 03:26 PM

Excellent post, Paul. I would add that bus powered FW drives are a little more of a risk because they start with a slower laptop drive in the first place. These are usually 4200 rpm or at most 5400 rpm drives that work on low voltage. If you're serious about video, go with a good 7200 rpm powered drive. I have a nice 4200 rpm bus powered setup from TransIntl and am very happy with it. But my needs are non-professional in this case. I do digital video but don't make a living with it (or hope to).

PeteWK

Macola · Feb 21, 2002, 07:59 PM

There is one thing to consider when using a FW drive for video editing that doesn't come up very often in these discussions (in my case, I learned by being burned

). There is a problem with OS X when you have more than one device attached to a FW bus--in my case, a DV camera and an external FW drive--that affects data transfer to the point where your drivers can be corrupted. This caused me no end of grief until i looked up Aple's knowledge base and found it was recognized as a bug; there's no solution yet, AFAIK.

In this situation, it would make sense to opt for an internal IDE drive. I don't have much choice, since I'm using a TiBook.

zigzag · Feb 21, 2002, 10:25 PM

Good sources of info on drives are www.barefeats.com and www.xlr8yourmac.com

You can buy a ready-made FW drive from Maxtor, Western Digital, EZQuest, LaCie, QPS, et al., or you can buy an IDE/ATA drive and put it into a FW enclosure from Granite, OWC, or the like. The latter method is a little cheaper and allows you to change drives as you please. As far as I can tell, all vendors are now using the Oxford 911 chip or the equivalent.

I haven't had to deal with trying to link up more than one FW device with OS X, but one strategy to deal with this is to download your DV onto a good internal drive first, then move stuff to and from the FW drive as needed.

It's a shame that FW was supposed to overcome the problems of SCSI but has failed to do so. I'd like to see someone try and hook up 63 FW devices.

[ 02-21-2002: Message edited by: zigzag ]

Eug · Feb 22, 2002, 07:18 AM

Originally posted by Macola:
There is one thing to consider when using a FW drive for video editing that doesn't come up very often in these discussions (in my case, I learned by being burned

). There is a problem with OS X when you have more than one device attached to a FW bus--in my case, a DV camera and an external FW drive--that affects data transfer to the point where your drivers can be corrupted. This caused me no end of grief until i looked up Aple's knowledge base and found it was recognized as a bug; there's no solution yet, AFAIK.

In this situation, it would make sense to opt for an internal IDE drive. I don't have much choice, since I'm using a TiBook.

Can you point me to the bug?

My Firewire drive no longer is recognized by Mac OS X, but it still works fine in Windows XP and in Mac OS 9. I always have a Firewire card reader daisychained to it, and I wonder if this bug is responsible for my problems.

Severed Hand of Skywalker · Feb 22, 2002, 09:17 AM

Originally posted by Eug:

Can you point me to the bug?

My Firewire drive no longer is recognized by Mac OS X, but it still works fine in Windows XP and in Mac OS 9. I always have a Firewire card reader daisychained to it, and I wonder if this bug is responsible for my problems.

Why don't you try plugging it directly into your Mac? That would answer that quick.

Eug · Feb 22, 2002, 10:35 PM

Originally posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker:


Why don't you try plugging it directly into your Mac? That would answer that quick.

The way I plug in the drive is Mac --> drive --> card reader. I also tried Mac --> drive and no card reader. Neither work.

I'm wondering if this bug killed by drivers somehow as he said, and now that they're killed, it wouldn't matter how I plugged in the drive.

Big Mac · Feb 23, 2002, 02:09 AM

This OS X Firewire bug is news to me. Can anyone provide any documentation on it? Firewire is Apple's flagship periperhal connection bus, and I cannot understand how Apple could let such a major bug go like that.

Mallrat · Feb 25, 2002, 12:16 AM

Originally posted by Big Mac:
This OS X Firewire bug is news to me. Can anyone provide any documentation on it? Firewire is Apple's flagship periperhal connection bus, and I cannot understand how Apple could let such a major bug go like that.

Yes, did the new update fix this problem?

vasu · Mar 12, 2002, 08:26 AM

*bump*

can anyone provide more information on this "bug" with firewire? Perhaps Macola can shed some documentation on the subject?

Macola · Mar 12, 2002, 10:52 AM

Originally posted by vasu:
*bump*

can anyone provide more information on this "bug" with firewire? Perhaps Macola can shed some documentation on the subject?

Sorry, haven't been checking the fora for a while.

The bug with data transfer and daisy-chained FW devices is reported in Article #106512 in Apple's Knowledge Base and showed up in 10.1. It was supposedly fixed in 10.1.2 but (for whatever reason) still happens with some FW drives. The driver corruption in my case was with a Maxtor 40G FW drive (an older model, which did not have an Oxford 911 chipset). My drive was not recognized under either OS 9 or OS X, and I had to get a data recovery shop to retrieve my files. I now have an OWC Mercury drive, still have problems transferring data to another external FW drive (also Oxford 911) but at least haven't had the driver corruption problem. I haven't tried any DV transfer/editing recently, so I can't say if 10.1.3 fixed the problem.

The general lesson here is to be very cautious with processes that require high transfer rates (DV and audio) and FW devices. Take a look at the Multimedia & DV forum: while some users do fine with daisy-chained devices, others swear by the "one device per bus" rule.

Simon X · Mar 12, 2002, 12:55 PM

Another option you might want to consider if you go the external route is www.medeacorp.com/ and their VideoRaid SCSI. Whilst more expensive than FW they are quite a bit cheaper than a similarly spec'd SCSI. The difference between their SCSI drives and regular ones is that they are actually IDE drive in the case with a SCSI bridge connected to a SCSI card in your Mac. These drives are fast enough to do uncompressed video so they may be overkill if you're doing DV. I've got my eyes on these drives for when (I hope!) I get to work on some bigger projects.