[dvwannabe]

I'm going to start editing Digital Video on my G4. And since DV eats up disk space, what is a good option for expanding the hard drive and how much should I have in total. I've been told to do an array with several small ATA/IDE drives hooked up to a firewire, what is this and where could I get one?

Or should I just go with a standard external firewire drive?

Or is there something better to install internally?

Cost will be a big deciding factor and I probably can't afford SCSI right now.

Thanks.

[MiniMan]

I put a Maxtor 80Gb in my cube to do just that...
I partitioned 20Gb to restore the image of the orignal drive and left 60Gb as a DV partition. So far it's working great. The 80Gb is no louder or hotter than the 20Gb and I haven't filled it up yet. When I do I can either get the external case and bring back my 20Gb or if prices come down (as I'm sure they will) I'll just get another 80Gb external firewire.

I got the 80Gb for $350 online from a PC parts place in NY. Maybe not the cheapest $ per Gb that I could have got, but for me getting a LOT of storage inside the Cube was important.

[MacNN Staff]

Transferring to the Peripherals forum.

Well, if you have a G4, you may as well put a high speed ATA drive internally before you go the FireWire route. If you're doing DV, get a fast 7200RPM drive (I like IBM, but Maxtor seems to please everybody) like the guy above noted.

The FireWire RAID array's are pretty expensive, but I've heard that they do a good job. Check any of the MacMall etc. catalogs - they'll have more info.

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Eliott Wolfe
Winnetka, Calif

[Paul S]

Wolfe is right. Go internal first for performance. The G4 has a controller for 2 ATA/66 hard drives (including the original drive). You can always add a PCI controller for additional drives. If you do, stay away from the Sonnet Tempo. It has a "known issue" with DV video, but you don't find that out until you call their tech support. VST and Promax make nice ATA RAID cards that work great. The IBM deskstar line of 7200rpm ATA/100 drives are probably the best performing drives on the market right now.

If you decide to go the external route, Maxtor has a new 80GB FW drive that has had excellent reviews. Mac Warehouse has it for around $385. It's only 5400rpm, but that won't make a big difference. The FireWire to IDE bridge chip in external drives are only EIDE, not even ATA/33 or /66, so the maximum transfer rate is only around 12MB/s instead of the 30+ you might see on /66.

What exactly is the "known issue" with the Sonnet Tempo card? I recently installed one and have not yet had any problems with a 60 gig Maxtor drive. Any more info would be appreciated. Thank you for your time.

[Bugs Bunny]

IBM 75GXP ATA/100 drives smoke any Maxtor drive, and they have a 75 gig. Just bought 2 of these drives and they fly.

[Paul S]

Gromit, the known issue is that playback of digital video is supposed to be choppy. To be honest, I never got to that point because my system had so many other problems with the card installed I called tech support. They told me about the issue at that time. My biggest problem was that ethernet wouldn't work. I had 2 hard drives in the system, 1 connected to the card and 1 connected to the original IDE controller (that drive wasn't supported by the card). Both had base OS9 systems installed fresh. Ethernet wasn't recognized on the drive connected to the card but was recognized on the drive not connected. I had it in a 266MHz beige G3 tower. I have since removed the card and everything is back to normal.

Ah! Thank you for your reply. I haven't had much chance to play around with DV, but all media I've played on my computer running a Maxtor 60gig on a Sonnet Tempo has run fine. Also, last Friday a firmware update was released (version 3.1.0). http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/ has reports from people who have applied the update. Seems that this may fix this or a similar problem.