I now do my editing from a laptop (g4 powerbook) and need to buy an external drive. I have looked around at the usual websites (Maxtor, Seagate etc) and haven't found anything that seems to suit video editing. The best I have found so far is a Lacie 'Big Disk Extreme' - Raid 0, firewire 800 (my laptop has firewire 800).

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10660

The 320 gb one goes for $320. This seems to me the perfect video editing external drive but I have read some grumblings about Lacie's reliability.

Does anyone have any experience with Lacie or know of any other similar products from other manufacturers?

Thanks,
PTN

lacie are very good, yep. That sounds like a good solution.

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xBox - standard;
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A silly amount of Cat-5 and usb cables

No problems with Lacie drives here. If I remember correctly, they use Western Digital branded hard drives inside the case.

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Just fyi on this (for the Brits): Amazon currently have an external 250GB Western Digital (I think) USB 2.0 7200rpm hard drive on offer for £99. I'm very tempted - for archiving rather than capturing.

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The biggest fool can ask questions that the wisest man cannot answer...

Just another recommendation - I've used a Fantom external firewire drive for video capture, and it's been awesome. They're available up to 200-300 gigabytes as I recall, and they are bloody fast. No skipped frames. I've even dropped it a few feet (and more than once ) and it still captured like a champ.

Edit: Oh, nevermind, the Fantom drives are FW400. :cry:

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800 is backward compatible.

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Contrary to common belief a firewire drive can be used for editing.
I have used one with A G4 running Media100 with Fully uncompressed Digibeta footage and although a little unstable at times it got me through the edit. If using any formats of a quality lower than BetaSP firedrives will work fine.
With DV footage it can easily handle the transfer rate. Just make sure its at least a 7200rpm drive. As usual if your board is a shitty cheap board with on board firewire it may be an issue but otherwise it's fine. Also seeing as your lappie is firewire 800 you are laughing.

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