Firewire (1394) disks

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My new "hobby" is proving to be more expensive and time-consuming that I could have imagined. I am refering to home video-editing of course!

I now need to purchase some storage for all these videos of my lovely children! I am considering three possibilities. I will prefer to buy 7200rpm disks (or faster) for this application...

1) install a new hard disk in my system (obviously). I would likely get an IBM ATA 100, 7200rpm disk (2x 40gb or so).

2) use a Maxtor "max-attach' disk with a 10/100 ethernet connetion. Anyone used these? Is there a 7200rpm 'network-attachable' disk out there? The fact that these disks are available to other machines on my small home network is a 'plus'.

3) Use a firewire-attached disk (1394). Maxtor make an external unit with the connector built-in, but you cannot swap-out the installed disk. There models also seem 'slow'.

3b) I like the idea of buying an external case that provides a Firewire 'adapter'. One installs any ATA66 IDE drive and it converts the signal to Firewire (no ATA100 available yet, that I know of). These units seem unreasonably expensive however (US$ 200+ for a case and a connector!). Anyone used these? Performance?

Thanks in advance for your comments!

Joseph Valenti
Valcomp Technology Inc.
Brokers of new and used computer hardware.
 
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Buy two Fast IBM drives and a RAID card and run RAID 0. You will be very happy with the results.

pill128

Take your Pill, and get some sleep.
 
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Just make sure the card and the drives are SCSI - Ultra160 would be best. I would contend that Seagate makes a better SCSI drive then IBM, but just make sure they are FAST (10K). Adaptec 3200S is the next card on my list. And video editing - whew! I would run 2000 pro with a dual processor and 2GB of RAM!