400GB Maxtor External £74.99 New Price

USB 2? Surely that's no good for video, though, is it?

USB 2 should be fine for DV. In fact I'm using one right now to do a multicam edit in Edius. It's fine with 3 streams. 4 makes it stutter.

Of more concern is that it's a Maxtor, whose current models don't have great reputations for reliability. It's a good price but one must check that the case is actively cooled.

I have no problem with USB2 external drives. Mark's right, Edius plays 3 DV streams fine but the buffer runs dry with 4. I've not yet run one on HDV; the transport stream should be fine, but I'd not expect to be able to play more than one stream of Canopus coded HD through it at a time.

However, I do disconnect every other USB device to do this, because USB is not guaranteed to sustain the data rates of video as is Firewire. So, you have to make sure that njothing else is gouing to contend for bus time, and don't connect yhard drives through USB hubs, make sure they connect straight to the computer. This is all common sense really, but it does make a difference.

Interesting. I always thought you had to have Firewire for DV.

You learn something new every day! :)

Been using 2 external HD's and 2 firewire HD's and both operate with no problems. The Maplin one looks a good bargain.

Harry

Staples also have drives on offer .

500GB Iomega USB2.0 at 99.00 incl. VAT - we just bought three!

Very smart looking units & much smaller than the 500GB LaCie BigDisks.

As for datarates - USB2.0 isn't good practice for editing video - but in practice a 500GB BigDisk will sustain a single stream of uncompressed SD.

These huge external drives are great for freeing up internal drives - you can stick them on the network easily too with a cheap'ish adapter.

Gavin, please tell me more about the cheap-ish adaptor, communal drives on my network is exactly what I'm trying to do.

Iomega Desktop Hard Drive 500 GB £91.53 (Inc vat) here:
http://www.it247.com/Product/69-33645/Iomega_Desktop_Hard_Drive_Value_Series_hard_drive_500_GB_Hi_Speed_USB.htm

Tibor, I think that was just an external USB drive. I think Alan is after "Network Storage", "Network Attached Storage" or "NAS" - more like this:

[url]http://www.it247.com/Category/60/Network_Attached_Storage_(NAS[/url])

or

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/search/?qfind=nas

or

http://www.span.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=25

(NB: I don't have any such products - just some pointers.)

Such devices either take an internal IDE drive, or connect to another external USB drive (or both) and provide an ethernet interface and the necessary inbuilt software (in flash memory!!) for file sharing across Ethernet.

They also sometimes provide printer attachment facilities too - and hence make a non-networked printer, networked. (Someone was asking about that too recently here, weren't they?)

Spot on Martin, that's the thing, I've got USB and Firewire encolsures, and am getting fed up with using "sneaker-net" connection between the machines, and don't really want to make drives in the serparate laptops (I don't use desktop machines anymore) available to others.

We use the Linksys adapters with 500GB LaCie drives.

[url]http://www.it247.com/Category/60/Network_Attached_Storage_(NAS[/url]

NOTE - THIS IS IMPORTANT AS IT ISN'T OBVIOUS WHEN YOU FIRST GET ONE>>>>>>

It will run 2 x USB2.0 drives BUT the adapter wipes and re-formats the drive for NAS operation - you can't just add or hot-plug a USB2.0 NTFS or FAT32 drive

Once formatted the drive will only work on the NAS adapter - unless you re-format it in Windows.

I don't know if they all work that way - I expect so - but the Linksys unit certainly does.

Thanks Gavin, that sounds like the one for me.

Re: Lynksys slug

These are quite slow though.

Also

There is no going back in my experience once reformatted that is it.

You can always get a drive like the WD on same page as lynksys unit with 10/100 connectivity and s/w to share/protect on network.

I agree with Chris about the speed of the Lynksys.
Alan, your laptops are probably new enough to have Gigabit ethernet connections, in which case you should look for network storage that has Gigabit ethernet too. Bufallo Linkstation Pro and TeraStation come to mind...

Thanks for the thoughts, I'm still pondering.

ChrisG wrote:
"There is no going back in my experience once reformatted that is it"
That's not strictly true. Most of the NAS boxes are linux based and format the storage disks as EXT2 or EXT3 which are not mountable on any standard MS windows OSs. There are 2 options for accessing data once the disks have been removed from the NAS box:
1) Boot the windows PC with a linux 'live' CD, there are many images available online and they regularly appear on mag. front discs. If you have a FAT32 partition, most live builds will write data. Some of them even write NTFS.
2) Install EXT2FS, see here:
http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net/ext2.html
There are a number of other FS bridges under development by the linux community.

On the subject of NAS boxes, what would be useful is for it to be a UPNP server allowing forthcoming UPNP Client Media Extenders to operate without any PCs running.

HTH

Steve

That ought to be made a sticky somewhere!!

Thanks
Chris (old enough to admit he doesn't know everything)

ChrisG,

In addition, linux live discs are also useful to retrieve files in an emergency from broken windows PCs. Note: if the data is not encrypted, this is also a bypass route around passwords!

Steve

With this talk of ext2, folk might like to check out my hands-on experiences with this Linux disc-partitioning format when messing with an Evesham iplayer PVR.

The review is here and the very fulsome forum thread (close to 400 replies and 30K reads) is here.

A lot of reading (interesting if your interested, not so much if you're not) but the bottom line was that using ext2-formatted USB-connected HDDs let me work around a whole lot of limitations that are otherwise imposed on users of the iplayer who want to export their recordings - and I was able to access these ext2-formatted discs under Windows XP.