External Hard drive - SATA or Firewire

[hrn]

I'm into getting an external hard drive box to be able to take some work home for editing. I'm looking at SATA or Firewire. It has to be fast enough to take care of about 40-50 tracks. And I want it to be one of these boxes in which I can put drives and exchange them myself.

Firewire use the ("old now") ATA disks...Will SATA be the new standard? And what about SATA and Firewire together in the future? I would really like to go Firewire but I really don't know.

Thinking of using hard drives as backup also...are they time consistent like tape backup systems do you think?

I'm spoiled with SCSI 160 speed in the studio and I really don't know about the performance of other disk systems.

Anyone with experience?

[maskedman72]

i myself use ez quest cobras with no complaints.

i think this might be what you are looking for though;

http://www.firedock.com/

[hrn]

Thanks,
I'll have a look at it

[quentinrittman]

my motherboard supports SATA300, and it came with a backplane bracket so i could run a sata drive externally. I've got a 250Gig SATA300 drive running and it forking flies. much cheaper than buying a firewire enclosure type drive. my only issue is the short distance i can have the drive fro mthe tower, but i've got a small shelf right next to the case, the drive ists quite happily on it.

and best of all, no cooling issues for it.

[Darius van H]

SATA drives are hot swapable, so you only need the cables hanging out the back of the comp' and you can use it like an external hard disk..no need for external housing.....D

[undermind]

quentinrittman, is the SATA drive you are using outside your case actually an internal drive?

I've got a SATA plug on the outside of my case for an external drive. But I'm having a hard time finding a name brand external SATA drive.

Thanks

[exalted wombat]

Also note that the standard SATA connector is only rated for a very low number of insertions. Something like 50 if I remember correctly. Yes, I was surprised too.

[theother]

Originally Posted by undermind

quentinrittman, is the SATA drive you are using outside your case actually an internal drive?

I've got a SATA plug on the outside of my case for an external drive. But I'm having a hard time finding a name brand external SATA drive.

Thanks

Ask GRADO on the Nuendo hardware forum. He can help.

[hrn]

Thought I would tell my experiencies as the original post is quite old. I bought two Adaptec firewire 400 cards for cheap and put one of them in my home computer and the other at the studio.

Both computers are "out of date" now with an Athlon 1.4 Ghz at home and Athlon 2100+ in the studio. The motherboards (Asus A7M266) don't even have USB2.....(who cares anyway...)

Then I got myself one Maxtor OneTouch II 200 GB and a Seagate 300GB, both 7200 rpm's IDE's. And it works like a charm. Certainly fast like hell.

They both actually compares positively with my internal 10k SCSI-160 drive....but that one is "old" too now...

Hail to Firewire