[jimbosyn]

My dual 2.0 G5 PM should ship today. I bought a 160gig external firewire 400 drive about a week ago to use with my powerbook for editing. The question I have is this. Which would you rather have for your PM. A External or Internal 160gig drive. I will be using it for video editing. I am pretty sure that an internal would be faster, but what would you prefer? I am still in the return window for the external drive, and an internal SATA is the same price. Thanks for any advice.

[CatOne]

Originally Posted by jimbosyn

My dual 2.0 G5 PM should ship today. I bought a 160gig external firewire 400 drive about a week ago to use with my powerbook for editing. The question I have is this. Which would you rather have for your PM. A External or Internal 160gig drive. I will be using it for video editing. I am pretty sure that an internal would be faster, but what would you prefer? I am still in the return window for the external drive, and an internal SATA is the same price. Thanks for any advice.

Internal. Definitely faster than FW400. Possibly faster than FW800, but only in the briefest of bursts when data comes from cache. But I'd fill both bays of the G5 before adding external storage, personally.

[action]

any internal option will cause an increase in fan noise. i have two additional drives internally via the sonnet sata 4+4 along with both stock drives filled and i have four external via the macgurus external case. the noise from the macgurus is not insignificant.

if you are doing any amount of video, you will need both internal and external expansion. i would definitely return your external drive and purchase a hotswapable case. i have the 4 bay macgurus sata enclosure and a two bay firewire 800 weibetech enclosure.

the weibetech is of higher quality in constuction and parts used then the macgurus but they both function as advertised.

here is a pic of my desk setup for size reference and a closer pick of the external cases.

http://chunglee.com/new/images/desk.jpg

http://chunglee.com/new/images/g5.jpg

chung lee

ps. i tried installing a third internal drive via the g5 bracket but the fans were spinning so loudly i had to disconnect it. i tried changing the thermal settings but the diagnostic disk said the temps were normal even though the fans were revving a full speed.

[robby818]

Internal is better for reasons stated. I'll add that on my powermac g5 rev a dual 2.0 the firewire 400 transfer speeds are slower than my old Quicksilver G4 733. its quite a bit slower actually. I dont know why.

[lilrabbit129]

Another vote for internal. I did just buy an external 250Gb HD for my powerbook though, but if I had a choice, I would definetly get an internal (if I owned a powermac).

[d.fine]

Internal, is cleaner. Why setup an external drive when you have an internal bay available. Just me. I use an external HD for backup purposes, it is only used when making backups, keeps my data safe.

[Gregory]

Both. Serial ATA external, maybe even RAID. As well as fill 'er up with RAM.
Also, a SeriTek/1VE4 will support native command queueing, native SATA internal does not.

[jimbosyn]

Hello everyone. Thanks for all of the advice! I have purchased a samsung 160 gig drive for $99.00 at microcenter. http://www.microcenter.com/single_pr...duct_id=181112 I have also gotten an extra 1gig of RAM. So as soon as my system gets here, I will have a dual 2.0 Ghz G5 with 1.5GIGs of ram an 2 160GB hdd. I just can't wait! So this presents another question. Should I stripe these drives with software raid for a fat 320giger? Or should I just keep the 2 160's seperate? I know this aids write performance, but I think that reads are actually a little slower. Anyone had experience with this?

[mousehouse]

if you create a RAID1 out of these two drives (creating one ~300GB volume) you increase your risk of losing data significantly. when one of these two drives fail (not unthinkable with heavy video-editing use) your complete system environment is gone. if you can live with the benefit of fast reads vs higher risk, go ahead but make frequent backups.

if read performance is not that important i'd go for 2x160 setup. something i read in an "Eug topic" was to use one of your drives for the source media and another for the destination render, that way utilitizing both drives and getting optimum speed. if you use only one drive it will trash away alternating between reads and writes on different areas of the disk (this will decrease with SATA tagged-command-queueing which is only now becoming available and is not supported by the PM's SATA controller if i'm not mistaken).

[Gregory]

Originally Posted by mousehouse

if you create a RAID1 out of these two drives (creating one ~300GB volume) you increase your risk of losing data significantly.

Stripped = RAID0.

You'll find that 300GB single drive w/ 16MB cache provides an excellent boot drive or for media. When I spoke of using RAID, I was thinking of a pair of drives, external.

Barefeats: SeriTek/1VE4

[mousehouse]

Originally Posted by Gregory

Stripped = RAID0.

darn! off course you're right. raid0 is striping, raid1 is mirrorring, etc etc.