[entelechy]

Just ordered a dual 2.5 G5 for video editing work, and would like to fill the internal drive slots with a couple 200-250 GB hard drives...Does anyone have any recommendations in terms of drives and/or vendors?

It's probably just me, but some friends and I have had some bad experiences with the bigger capacity drives, and my thinking is to get 600 GB or so internal, and then expand external as/when needed.

Also, apologies if this question has (most likely) come up before...I did a search, and checked a link to xlr8yourmac, but couldn't find exactly what I'm after.

Many thanks!
~Chris

[direinsanity]

Personoly, if you have the money i would run some 72gb raptors internaly and larger drive's externaly, you can save and back up all your video on the bigger esxternal, but use all the working files on the raptors and it should be very fast, for big internal drives tho, I would sugest segate, he have one of the fastest seek times for a 7200rpm drive.

[power142]

Despite their high initial outlay ($5999), the XserveRAID can't be beaten if you need lots of capacity with lots of speed.

[deboerjo]

Seagate's Baracuda drives are reasonably fast, very quiet and cool, and support SATA natively (no SATA-ATA bridge chip like on many SATA drives out there). Their newest drives also have the highest densities in the industry, giving them more capacity with fewer platters.

[entelechy]

I would love to be able to afford an X-serve, but I'm already well past straining the budget boundaries with the G5/Cinema and the 4GB of RAM I ordered from Crucial.

A friend who's also been doing some heavy editing just firewired a dozen 200GB LaCie external drives together and hasn't had a single problem after months of intensive work.

I'm definitely looking into Seagate...apparently they've got that super-fast 400GB drive they developed, but it's not hitting the market for awhile.

I had a 500GB drive from OWC that I was using to back-up my music collection. 3-400 CDs into the process, the whole drive crapped-out and refused to mount. I ended up returning it for credit against a smaller LaCie.

Some fellow editing friends have also had some major problems with the bigger drives - is this common? However flawed the thinking may be, I rather play it safe and spread it out on "smaller" drives - even for video editing, they should be fine for my uses right now.

I've had good luck with LaCie, and Western Digital drives, but am intrigued with Seagate. All the reviews I've read seem to rate them as good or better than WD, although if I recall, there are only so many manufacturers of the drives themselves, and the other parties just set them in their own packaging, right?

Anyway, thanks for the responses thus far, and any yet to come

~C

[Big Mac]

You really shouldn't draw conclusions about HDs from your experience with OWC, IMO. I would never buy a big ticket item that carried the OWC brand. I have read many negative stories about OWC purchases, and I was dissatisfied with the one thing I purchased from them.

[sodamnregistered2]

Originally posted by deboerjo:
Seagate's Baracuda drives are reasonably fast, very quiet and cool, and support SATA natively (no SATA-ATA bridge chip like on many SATA drives out there). Their newest drives also have the highest densities in the industry, giving them more capacity with fewer platters.

I put a Seagate Barracuda ST3160023AS 160GB in my dual G5 2GHz.

I went on vacation and when I came back, the drive would not power up. It was causing me grief in general, and kernel panics in particular.

The drive has a 5 year warranty, and I'm sending it in for repair/replacement.

Not a slam against Seagate, more like, be sure you keep things backed up, because hard drives are still the weak link in computer performance in terms of both speed and reliability.

I'm thinking about making a raid when the 160GB comes back from RMA. OS X supports drag and drop raid. I already use externals for back-up.

arghh.

[power142]

No hard drive manufacturer guarantees that the drive won't fail, and none that I know of will recover your data for you when it does.

I've been thinking about this a bit recently... If you value data security above all else, then there aren't an awful lot of choices for the G5 (besides an XserveRAID):

1) You could get two of the biggest SATA drives available (Hitachi 400GB?) and use RAID 1
2) You could get multiple external firewire drives and create multiple RAID sets
3) You could get an external housing and mount multiple SATA drives in it, and then hook up to a RocketRAID card

Kano make an external RAID 5 unit, but it's almost $2k :/ Having pulled that face, no sophisticated setup will be cheap.

My choice would probably be for #3, as #1 doesn't give the capacity you desire, and #2 involves too many component failure possibilities (what with cables, multiple ATA->firewire chipsets, and THEN the drives themselves). I'm sure there are other possibilities also.

[deboerjo]

Originally posted by entelechy:
Some fellow editing friends have also had some major problems with the bigger drives - is this common? However flawed the thinking may be, I rather play it safe and spread it out on "smaller" drives - even for video editing, they should be fine for my uses right now.

Bigger drives often means more platters. More platters means more strain on motors/bearings and more heat. It's not a solid correlation, but in general, yes, that's true. I never buy drives over 3 platters, and I prefer 2-platter devices.

Originally posted by entelechy:
I've had good luck with LaCie, and Western Digital drives, but am intrigued with Seagate. All the reviews I've read seem to rate them as good or better than WD, although if I recall, there are only so many manufacturers of the drives themselves, and the other parties just set them in their own packaging, right?

Correct, I don't know who LaCie uses, but they don't manufacture their own drives last I checked. Major manufacturers are WD, Maxtor, Seagate, HGST (aka Hitachi, formerly IBM), Samsung, Fujitsu (mostly laptops), and Toshiba (laptops only).

Hitachi's my current favorite for ATA, because of their sheer speed. For SATA, I want something with native SATA support (rather than being an ATA drive with a bridge chip tacked on the end) for full SATA functionality, including NCQ. Until recently, that meant Seagate was the only option. The new Maxtor MaxlineIII family is now SATA-native, though. Western Digital I'm not happy with. Confusing product line (same model number refers to many different drives) and poor reliability in my experience.

[vdrummer]

To get an objective assessment of HD reliability, I've depended on http://www.storagereview.com (free sign in req'd). The crappy IBM Deskstar 75Gb drives that crashed on me four times had poor ratings that I wished I knew about before buying them. My Seagate Barracuda ATA IV's that are highly rated are working great.

[awcopus]

Here's what I'm doing, starting tomorrow.

1. A four bay hot-swappable SATA enclosure from MacGurus.

2. Sonnet's new PCI_X SATA card that supports 4 external SATA drives.

3. 4 300 GB Maxtor SATA drives (purchased from newegg) in that Macgurus enclosure up there in item (1).

The drives and Sonnet card arrive tomorrow.

In the ol' 2.5, I'm running dual 400 GB drives, but I've got concurrent projects and need space desperately.

I'll report back on how this is going.

[macaddict0001]

I would recommend two raided raptor's internally for use as the macosx install and a scratch disk. Get as many external drives as you can afford, because if your doing video projects then its only a matter of time before you use all that space.

[bighead]

I would never use a Maxtor in a reliability-critical application. I have seen too many dead Maxtors to consider them for anything but the most carefree application, and then only if absolutely necessary.

Recently, I've replaced an exceedingly high amount of Seagate drives, namely the 80 GB PATA Barracudas. I've seen some of their SATA drives fail too, but not as many as those other ones. The 80 GB Hitachi slimline DeskStar drives are also not too good in my experience. Replaced many of those suckers too. (the PATA version)

The only manufacturer I would buy for a desktop machine is Western Digital. In my experience, at least, I've never encountered a failed WD. I chose two of the WD2000JB drives for the RAID1 setup in my MDD server, and they have operated like champions without so much as a hiccup.

I'm considering an upgrade to larger drives, but would most likely jump to SATA. While WD doesn't currently make any drives larger than 250 GB, if I were to do the switch now, I would buy two of the WD2500SD RAID Edition 250 GB drives. For a hardware RAID card, there has been a lot of talk about the Highpoint RocketRAID 1820a card. It doesn't allow for external drives, but you can run cables out through a PCI slot. THe guy who initially had an expose on the card on his HD video site no longer reccommends the card. Go figure.

It's really a toss up. You might consider going with a Sonnet RAID card, but it doesn't allow for booting from a RAID set. No matter what you do, I cannot stress enough to use Western Digital drives. You will not regret the purchase.

(For the record, I've got a 100 GB Seagate 2.5" drive I'll be putting into my PowerBook to see what happens, but I still stand by my statements on Seagate's desktop drives.)

[awcopus]

Originally posted by bighead:
I would never use a Maxtor in a reliability-critical application. I have seen too many dead Maxtors to consider them for anything but the most carefree application, and then only if absolutely necessary.

I agree with you in general, but Maxtor's latest 300GB 7200rpm SATA offering is simply wonderful. Super quiet, very reliable, 3-year warranty, and if you don't believe me, believe storagereview.com.

For anyone interested in how my config (described above) is working, all I have to say is that I am very happy. The MacGurus enclosure is built like a tank and runs very quietly. The Maxtor drives are very quiet and running cool (I can monitor this thanks to the LCD readouts on the hotswappable bays) even with pretty intense audio-editing.

1.2 terabytes of online storage that is running as fast as (if not faster than) the internal SATA bus. A year or so ago I made a big stink about how I wasn't going to upgrade to a G5 until my storage options improved dramatically. I made the leap based on the expectation of the solution I'm running now, and it's looking great!

Macgurus enclosure, about $500... Sonnet 4+4 SATA card, about $200, and four 300 GB drives from newegg, about $825.

[power142]

Great to hear you worked it out, the new Sonnet card really makes a difference to those of us in the market for this kind of setup.

What RAID software are you using? Are you using OSX RAID 0 ?

Regarding the drive reliability thing, I work in an environment with lots of workstations and I see a _lot_ of drives fail, and no particular manufacturer sticks out as being better or worse than another. Be happy with what you have.

[awcopus]

Originally posted by power142:
Great to hear you worked it out, the new Sonnet card really makes a difference to those of us in the market for this kind of setup.

What RAID software are you using? Are you using OSX RAID 0 ?

Regarding the drive reliability thing, I work in an environment with lots of workstations and I see a _lot_ of drives fail, and no particular manufacturer sticks out as being better or worse than another. Be happy with what you have.

I have RAIDED two of the 300GB drives, and let the other two as single volumes. Doing some tests this weekend to see if I really need the Striping advantage. Frankly, I probably don't, considering that I'm editing DVCAM footage. But we'll see.

Also plan to run some extensive batch capturing to the Sonnet drives this weekend. I'm sure there won't be a problem. I'll post on my experience with this next week.

[awcopus]

So far, the system is humming along terrifically. There is a performance improvement from the OS X RAIDing, but it is not significant enough for me to keep the RAID going. So I'm going back to single volumes, which are better suited to my multi-project goals.

I have to reiterate, the MacGurus enclosure is whisper quiet and so very solidly built. Having been underwhelmed with the build quality on Granite's larger enclosures, I'm decidedly a MacGurus' convert. And I've been a Sonnet fan for a while, so this new offering only bolsters that.

[SkaGoat]

You can't beat the WD Raptors for speed...

[Oneota]

I don't know if they make SATA drives or not (I assume so), but Samsung's drives are getting surprisingly good marks on NewEgg's review pages. Pretty much everything else they make is of pretty good quality, so I'd have no reason to doubt the quality of their hard drives.

Just food for thought.

[awcopus]

Originally posted by SkaGoat:
You can't beat the WD Raptors for speed...

But you can beat them for price-to-capacity-performance ratio. Raptors for anything less than HD is sort of overkill, and even for HD, they get very expensive very quickly. The XServe RAID is using using standard 7200 RPM SATA for crying out loud, and people do plenty of uncompressed HD editing on those.

[power142]

The Xserve RAID units are a little different though - they use 7 drives in parallel, with a dedicated RAID controller (in the unit itself) and generally have big beefy cache.

The raptors would only help out when you can't have a greater number of drives, since their higher spindle speed helps them sustain higher sequential throughput. The Xserve RAID achieves this through brute force, although it is mighty effective