THSCC Forums

So I've apparently used up all but about 25 gigs of my 750gig hard drive in my iMac. Mostly all the HD video I've been taking lately between kid & family and track stuff.

I've got a couple 500gig external drives which I don't really use since they are PC formatted, and I don't want to re-format them... so I need a new one that I can dedicate to the Mac.

My question I guess is... what should I be looking for in a large capacity (3TB?) that's speedy enough to store my raw HD video on? If it matters, the iMac is a Core i7 quad core. NewEgg has some good deals, I just want to know if there's anything to look for, or look OUT for.

Thanks!

_________________
Stacy King
Midlife Crisis Participant

I'll have to double check, but I'm almost certain I've got a firewire port on my iMac... so I'm kind-of assuming I need to look for a hard drive that's compatible in that respect too. Right?

_________________
Stacy King
Midlife Crisis Participant

FWIW... I'm looking at this one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136871

Pre-formatted... but if I can get something similar/equal performance, but without the Mac-targeted pricing, that would be acceptable.

_________________
Stacy King
Midlife Crisis Participant

Stacy,

How long is it taking you to fill up your drive? You might look into a NAS with 4-6 drives ran in raid 5 (for speed and redundancy). You can store all your video on them and access from any OS, assuming the file format can be read.

Speed will be something to consider. the bigger (read pricier) ones can push/pull enough to not worry about. If you go that route, you will have to consider upgrading your network. I think n or g speeds can handle most if not all of it, but I haven't really done enough research on the wireless side as I am mostly wired and don't care.

The above might be over kill, but I have 2 full hd's on my pc and have done some of the initial research on expanding my houses hd space and feel a nas fits my needs well.

If your looking for just a USB drive, defiently get as much as you can assuming money isn't a concern. storage space seems to always disappear quickly.

Thanks Jason... I definitely need to do some more research I think.

I've had this computer since March of last year. And now that I think about it, it's only @ 550 gig I've filled up (I've got 200 gig partitioned for Windows XP.)

I've been using iMovie for my video editing/creation... and it requires a mac-formatted external drive if I'm not using the internal drive. I am considering upgrading to Final Cut X, so I need to find out how it handles external drives.

_________________
Stacy King
Midlife Crisis Participant

final cut from what I remember is the "big boy" I would imagine it will do well with network or external assuming they can feed data quick enough. That being said... mac and final cut are past my knowledge currently so don't quote anything I said above

Make sure that the drive can work with a Mac. I have a Seagate drive that does not play with Time Machine

_________________
1990 Faded Reddish CSP Lite Miata
2002 Electron Blue Corvette Z06
2005 Mazda 6 Wagon
2003 Nissan Pathfinder DTV (Dog Transport Vehicle)

From my experience, especially with external hard drives, i haven't found one yet that I couldn't format or be read from a mac. But I usually go with Western Digital (WD), so there may be compatible issues with Seagates. Also I haven't used Time machine with any of them, so that may be an issue to look into if that's what you'll be using. Home severs can be pricey, but you can always by a big one and just add more drives as needed. As far as speed, WD caviler Blue/Black are good/great. Those are the two I go for. The Blue models are the cheaper of the two if you are going to buy a couple to for a RAID array on a budget and work just as good as the Black in home servers.