Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
DCP Directory
MillimeterTest Drive: External Drive Connections, Part 1
Feb 11, 2008 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer
The NewerTech miniStack v3 offers eSATA, FireWire 800, FireWire 400, and USB 2.0 connectivity.
While most Core 2 Duo-based notebooks have enough horsepower for serious video editing, few have the disk space for even moderately long projects. If you’re editing on the road, this means getting an external hard drive that’s fast enough to keep up with your editing, but won’t weigh you down. Fortunately, there’s lots of good things happening in this market in terms of speed, size, and costs, so if you haven’t looked at portable external drive technology for a while, you’ll be pleased with what you see.
In this first segment of this month’s newsletter, I’ll lay out the available technologies for connecting to external drives and discuss theoretical speeds and product costs. In the next segment, I’ll describe the results of Macintosh and Windows benchmark tests that I ran using the various external connection standards.
The title of this newsletter is HDV@Work, so I’ll describe technologies sufficient for the 3.5MBps streams that we capture and retrieve during editing. The solutions I discuss won’t work for uncompressed HD, 2K, or 4K frames, but they are ideal for editing DV or HDV source videos—even those involving multiple camera shoots.
I know this because this newsletter was motivated by a true need for portable editing; basically, it was either find a way to edit an 80-minute, two-camera shoot ballet while on the road or stay home while my wife and kids visited family back in Atlanta over the holidays. Fortunately, my Apple MacBook Pro offered lots of connection options: USB 2.0, FireWire 400 (1394a), FireWire 800 (1394b), and an ExpressCard slot that could accept an eSATA connector.
I found the miniStack v3 drive from NewerTech, which was affordable ($169 for 250GB), portable (6.5”x6.5”x1.5”), and highly compatible, with connectors for all standards noted above. Not only did the miniStack V3 save my holiday, it also serves as the perfect test bed for assessing the performance of each connector type.
