Enclosures with FireWire IDE or SATA?

[Sakuya]

I'm looking to get an external hard drive by getting those enclosures and a separate hard drive for my video editing class. It requires firewire 400, a power adapter, and able to work on both Windows and Mac OSX 10.5 or higher. I'm trying to save more money by looking at some cases on Ebay. While I have found a seemingly okay one, it is for IDE drives and not SATA. Does anyone have experience in video editing and uses external drives? Which would would be a better choice, IDE or SATA? When I try to find a SATA case with firewire at other places, it becomes much more expensive. Any advice or recommendations would be appreciated!

[jagabo]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010090092+1053807123+1054...e=&srchInDesc=

Little difference in performance between IDE and SATA in an external 1394/USB2 enclosure.

[redwudz]

One other site with a large selection: http://www.cooldrives.com/

[Poppa_Meth]

AMS enclosures are some of the best I've ever used, but I've only used the IDE versions. SATA models don't seem to get nearly as good a score in most reviews.

[Sakuya]

I see, thanks everyone for the help!

[edDV]

There are EIDE and SATA hard drives ...
and then there are external enclosures with USB2, IEEE-1394 (Firewire) and/or eSATA interface.

Various enclosures will take EIDE and/or SATA drives. This is an internal issue to the enclosure. The interface doesn't care.

Older enclosures take EIDE drives only with USB2 and/or Firewire interface.

Later model enclosures require a SATA drive but some have internal connectors for both EIDE and SATA. Some that have both limit external EIDE connection to USB2 or Firewire where SATA drives can also connect eSATA.

Theoretical/real world maximum sustained transfer rates for external drives are:

USB2 480/240 Mb/s or ~ 30MB/s (more subject to CPU interrupts)
Firewire 400/256 Mb/s or ~32MB/s (less subject to CPU interrups)
eSATA 3000/480* Mb/s or ~60MB/s (WD Raptors may reach as high as 90-120MB/s)


*SATA 150 and 300 interface in theory can transfer 1.5 or 3.0 Gb/s (187 or 375 MB/s) but other than RAM cache, hard drives are much slower for sustained transfer. SATA and eSATA interfaces are capable of similar sustained rates when eSATA cables are short (~1m).

[INFRATOM]

You must consider the future technology when purchasing peripherals. Now the trend is for SATA because of speed most motherboards use SATA and eSATA as standard. eSATA can plug in and out without reboot. Firewire is standard for Video 400 speed some add extra card for 800 speed and compatibility with MAC. Cheap ones often have a chip that may not be compatible with camera or something. I suggest buy SATA type that has all the outputs eSATA, Firewire and USB2 for connection to older motherboards. New USB3 is on the way which is faster than firewire.

[edDV]

Another issue is disk partitioning/formatting for PC and Mac.

Windows FAT32 can be read or written by both but is limited to 32GB partitions and 2 or 4 GB file limits unless special software is used.

XP/Vista generally use NTFS formatting. OSX can read NTFS but cannot write without special software.

Mac formatting for FCP is reviewed in this link. A PC cannot read a Mac formatted disk without special software.
http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/partitioning_tiger.html

So what to do? Without spending extra money you can partition for separate MAC and NTFS formatting.

Otherwise you will need software on the Mac to write to NTFS or software on the PC to read and write to Mac format.

Or you can run Windows on the Mac (e.g. Parallels or VMWare) to copy between NTFS and Mac formatted partitions.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/12/16/51TC-parallels-fusion_1.html

There are many ways to do this but you must plan ahead and buy the right software.

[Sakuya]

The drive needs to be partitioned if I buy them separately? I bought this one actually: 3.5" Internal Kit PATA 300GB ST3300631A-RK. Oh wow, it's out of stock now. Good thing I bought one.

[edDV]

If it is formatted it would probably be one partition NTFS.

Check to see if the school Mac can read and write NTFS. If so then you are set.

[Sakuya]

Dang it, it seems I didn't make it. My item is backordered.

[edDV]

It's getting more difficult to find Firewire. Newer packaged external drives have just USB2 or USB2/eSATA.

For Mac you will want Firewire.

[Sakuya]

Oh yes, definitely Firewire. I think I'm going to go with this one:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Hitachi/0A35397/

[RabidDog]

I have found that external enclosures work pretty well, and having recently purchased an ESATA one, can state it appears much faster than Usb2 (it has a usb2 i/face as well). An external drive CAN be formatted to 300gb+ under fat32 using swissknife software not under windows.. however fat32 still suffers from 4gb max file size .. it will bring up a spurious "Disk full" if you try to create a larger file. SO fat32 = mac + PC or NTFS part + HFS part. Mine is one part NTFS, one part Fat32 .. a pain, but necessary for compatibility.

[rhegedus]

Bought an Icy Box a few months back when I had some internal drive problems. Worth it's weight in gold: USB2, eSATA and a power switch.

[JohnnyMalaria]

If your video source is a DV or HDV camcorder and you want to go the FireWire route for the hard drive then be sure not to connect them to the same FireWire interface. Typically, that means the same card with three ports. This is because many camcorders don't play fair and want to take complete control of the interface. The result is often deadlock. The safest thing to do is use a different technology for the drive. In my case, I use USB2.0 drives and keep all my FireWire interfaces free for my DV/HDV equipment.