Posts Tagged “firewire”

Personal Disclaimer – I hate it when websites ‘review’ products without really testing them. What especially kills me is when they quote stats off a sell sheet as if they actually got those results in practice. Therefore this is not a review of the Drobo because I don’t own a Drobo. However, this IS an explanation of why I’m not buying a Drobo – at least not in it’s current form. Read on… Read… »

Continuing my series of reviewing every hard drive solution I’ve ever touched, I want to talk about the Vantec NexStar. Not only this particular hard drive dock but the general concept, the goods and bads about it, including some benchmarks.

I’ve always like the idea of the hard drive dock. Recently I needed to back up a massive amount of data and was on a tight budget to do it. I purchased 5 of these NexStar docks for about $35 $39 a piece, and a box of 1 TB hard drives. The dock works by plugging your favorite raw SATA drive right in to the top (like a Nintendo Cart). It has a power button on the front and USB and eSATA connections on the back. Vantec makes other versions, one with the addition of FireWire.  Mine performed very well. In practice, using the eSATA connection I was able to fill up a TB in about 3 hours. When I started having problems with my FreeAgent drive I did benchmarks on all of these solutions. Read… »

A few years ago I moved towards eSATA connectivity for drives.  SATA (or Serial ATA) is the connection that is on the actual drive and has blazing fast transfer speeds up to 3Gb/sec.  The concept is that whatever drive enclosure you buy has some sort of interface card that ‘converts’ SATA to USB or Firewire.  That’s the definition of a bandwidth bottleneck. Using SATA to SATA connectivity should eliminate any bottleneck and give you the full bandwidth of the drive.  eSATA is simply an external version of the SATA connector.  I’ll do more detailed explanations in later posts, but in general to use eSATA you need a PCI host adaptor card and a drive with an eSATA connection.

I was excited when the FreeAgent Pro came out because of the eSata connectivity.  I got a great deal and paid around 100 bucks at Fry’s for a 1TB model.  Every other article I’ve seen of the FreeAgent Pro drive gives it a rave review and claims that the 3Gb/sec is blazing fast.  It should be – but it’s not.  It’s also important to note that these reviewers probably never tested the eSATA connection for speed. They’re just quoting the Seagate data sheet – even using the same word to describe it.  If they actually tested it or benchmarked it they would report honestly on how the drive is actually performing. No single drive (today) performs at 3Gb/s because that is the maximum burst bandwidth of the drive interface.  In practice you’re average is going to max out at 1/4 – 1/3 that rate.

Seagate’s datasheet on the (now) FreeAgent Pro Classic has this to say: “It provides eSATA connectivity at blazing speeds up to 3Gb/sec, FireWire® 400 connectivity for Macs and digital video users, as well as USB 2.0 connectivity, the most commonly used interface in the world today.”

The drive seemed fine to me until I tried copying a large chunk of video files to it using the eSATA connection. A copy function that should have taken only an hour or so was claiming that it would take 30 hours! So I decided to start taking some benchmarks and get to the bottom of the problem. Read… »

By far the best and most reliable portable drive I’ve used is the G-Raid series by G-Technology.  I have 4 of them, some are 4 – 5 years old, and they all still work great.

Internally, G-Raid has two 3.5″ SATA drives that are striped together using RAID level 0 for speed.  The stripe management is all handled inside the box. The mac sees it as one volume. Therefore if you have a 500GB G-Raid, inside is two 250GB drives.  These arrays are very fast and can handle multiple streams of DVCPRO HD. I edited a show in FCP at 720P and never experienced any drop frames. From a reliability standpoint I’ve never had any hardware problems with them but have seen the typical mac volume problems. However I’ve never had any data loss from it.

G-Tech now has a version 2 of this drive with ‘Triple Interface’ FireWire 400, 800 and USB 2.0. Newer drives get up to 2TB capacity for under $550.

Now let’s examine the disadvantages.  The main concern is that with 2 drives striped together you are risking up to 2TB of data with twice as many chances of a hardware failure.  If either of the two physical hard drives inside the box die you lose all the data on both drives. If you’re using them for media and have the tapes as a backup – it might be an acceptable a low risk.  Like I said, I’ve never had data loss.

As part of my “moving forward” theme (out with the old) I’m trying to lower the risks of data loss. I will most likely be selling my G-Raid drives in favor of a larger safer total solution. Since this solution will likely be based on a sata connection, I might keep one for transporting files.

There are other newer G-Tech solutions such as the G-Speed which I’ll talk about another day.

After reflecting on the iomega review, I decided to get past the past and bring things more current.  So, here I’m going to sum up several hard drive solutions of old and what lessons I’ve learned from them. Remember that these views (the whole site actually) come from a mac perspective and using pro-applications.

MacPower IceCube

I can’t count how many of these clear case hard drives we bought from Melrose Mac back in the day.  They are known by many names: MacPower IceCube, ClearLight, and California Hard Drives. They started in the 100GB variety and eventually got up to 250 and higher.  The problem is that there’s no fan. Inside is a 3.5″ ATA drive attached to an interface card converting it to FireWire (and USB) surrounded by a metal frame encased in plastic.  They don’t breath at all and they get very hot. As you can see there are holes in the metal, but they are blocked by the plastic. The name IceCube must only refer to it’s appearance. At one point I had a vertical stack of them and the heat from the bottom drive(s) cooked all the ones above it.  After experiencing my first click of death I placed them side by side to allow for some ventilation. Read… »

About 4 years ago I hired an assistant editor to log and capture footage for a documentary.  I gave her a brand new iomega hard drive and 40 hours of tape. About a week later she gave them back – all captured “safe” to the hard drive. Then she added, “oh yeah, the drive was making a weird noise.”

The end of that story is that the drive died shortly after I got it home. iomega support was responsive and send me a replacement drive, but I lost all the data and had to recapture everything.  I’ve had problems with the replacement as well but still have it. iomega’s never been high on my list but this incident put them even lower. I think its partly an enclosure issue and partly an interface issue, which may have been resolved in the newer product lines.  The “weird noise” she mentioned was actually the fan, which you can see in the picture as a circle at the back of the enclosure.  The fan rubbed against something causing a loud noise. Both the original drive and the replacement had this problem.  The fan also didn’t cool the drive enough as it gets very hot, and as we know heat is death to drives. 

What made the case appealing was all the connectivity.  But I think whatever interface they were using had some problems.  The USB was slow.  The power switch was useless.  It didn’t turn the drive on or off and didn’t have any click feedback.

Of course this model is several years old. iomega’s newer drives might be better, but in general I’ve not been happy with their designs.  Please comment about your experiences with this drive and other/newer iomega drives.  Was this an isolated incident or is their entire line sub-par?

OH, by the way.  This drive is for sale.  After this rave review, let’s get those offers in..

The other day I discussed Apple’s move to DisplayPort on the new MacBooks.  Their other big news was that they completely dropped firewire on the MacBook, and only have firewire 800 on MacBook Pros. In blogger terms this is old news (over a week ago) and has already been discussed to death by many other sites. Yet for me it is still something that has to be considered at a practical level. Like it or not firewire is on the way out and I have a lot of firewire drives.  On the other hand, my brand new mac pro still has firewire and I’ll be able to use these drives for years to come.  So the wheels are turning and I’m studying different solutions.

Every few years that old Moore’s Law kicks in and new hard drives come out that double or more the capacity of the old ones.  My MOA is that whan I worry a drive is about to die, I typically copy the entire contents of the old drive into a folder on the new one.  By now I’ve done this several times over and inside a 1TB drive I might have a folder which contains a old 250GB drive and inside that I have a folder that contains an old 100GB drive, inside which I have a folder with contents from several powerbooks ago. But now it’s time to organize things better and upgrade to some serious storage.

But what storage solutions are right for my home system? What will give me the most speed, the highest capacity, and reasonable data protection for the best price?  Of course these questions can’t be completely answered without first knowing what the various applications for the storage are.  Over the next few posts I want to show some different options that I’m considering.  I also want to talk some history and review the various drives that I have now and use at home and at work.  This discussion will take several days. Read… »