External Drive recommendation?

[yogart]

I'm thinking of getting a 1 TB external drive for capture video, editing, and compressing. I reviewed some Western Digitals and had bad reviews in Amazon.com. What is a good brand / model?

[zoobie]

try going to www.newegg.com where the consumer reviews can be trusted

[hech54]

I have two internal 500GB Samsung SATA drives for capture...never a problem. My c: drive is also a Samsung - 250GB.

[davideck]

Office Depot has the Verbatim External 1 TB on sale this week. The one I bought shows up as a Samsung Drive. It has a rugged (but deep) enclosure with a soft power switch. It comes formatted to FAT32, but a quick_format to NTFS took less than a minute. 3 Year Warranty. So far, I am very pleased.

[edDV]

For capture and faster file copy consider eSATA.

[zoobie]

yes...spend an extra $10 and get an extended 3-5 year warranty
the way this crap is made these days, you'll probably use it

[JustOneOfMany]

For capture and faster file copy consider eSATA.

My experience with the WD 1 TB external drive is that it works great with Windows 7 (64 bits) and Vista (64 bits) in USB2 mode only. It is very unpredictable with the eSata mode but much faster when it worked...

[Soopafresh]

Get a 1 TB external drive that's a single 1TB drive, rather than 2X 500GB in Raid 0 or JBOD. It'll reduce your chances of data loss.

[edDV]

For capture and faster file copy consider eSATA.

My experience with the WD 1 TB external drive is that it works great with Windows 7 (64 bits) and Vista (64 bits) in USB2 mode only. It is very unpredictable with the eSata mode but much faster when it worked...

eSATA should be rock stable since it runs from an isolated hardware disk controller.

USB2 is controlled by a software disk controller and is subject to interrupt and OS priority.

Typical max USB2 sustained disk transfer is ~30 MB/s or below.

eSATA runs at near max disk sustained rate ~60-90 MB/s (higher for Raptors).

[yogart]

My intent of the external drive is not backup but rather to put all of raw video in it, and then put the edited and then compressed videos in it. It that OK? Will an exteranl esata drive work like an interanl sata drive?

[edDV]

My intent of the external drive is not backup but rather to put all of raw video in it, and then put the edited and then compressed videos in it. It that OK? Will an exteranl esata drive work like an interanl sata drive?

During capture, the "raw" video is a data stream and is subject to frame loss. This is a delicate stage. USB drives are subject to interrupt and frame loss during "capture". Once the video is in a file, OS copy becomes a packet transfer similar to a network transfer. Copy is complete when all packets are received. It may gap realtime but all the file gets copied.

That said a modern multi-core laptop should be able to keep up so long as other processes are in lower priority or standby.

An eSATA drive will work like an internal SATA drive.

[yogart]

Can an external esata drive be disconnected from one PC and then plugged into a differnet PC? Will it work the easy?

[edDV]

Can an external esata drive be disconnected from one PC and then plugged into a differnet PC? Will it work the easy?

Yes. It can be hot swapped.

[yogart]

Is it hard to make your own enclosure estata drive?

Is an enclosure made estata drive more reliable than a regular external drive?