advice for external hard disk drive for white ibook dual USB?

Hi, I need advice on getting an external hard disk for my white ibook G3 Dual USB (500 MHZ G3). I need some some space for small video editing projects. My internal HD is only 10GB. I have a few concerns...

1. I only have one Firewire drive (I think it's a firewire 400) I do not have an idea how I can capture video and store it to the external hardrive. Do external firewire drives have a slot for the camera?

2. What are the best external HD around? I was thinking of getting a 160 GB since I have a tight budget (I'm only a student).

3. Is it advisable to get an external hard drive for video projects?

I really appreciate your advice. Please help!

Well, you're in a tricky situation:

If you're going to hook up a MiniDV camera (digital camcorder), you usually connect them using iLink, which is another name for Firewire.

So far so good, as your iBook has firewire.

But video files can be huge, as I recently found out (25GB for around 1,5 hours of uncompressed material) so you WILL need an external drive for serious editing. (And compressing before you edit in iMovie or Final Cut is not an option if you want to retain the quality)...

The problem is: You only have one firewire port (as you stated in 1) I believe) and so can't hook up a camcorder and the firewire drive at the same time.

You USB ports are only USB 1.1 which is too slow for an external drive...

So basically I'd look into an internal drive upgrade..you can get 80GB drives for laptops nowadays which should be enough for some editing and you can then always hook up an external drive to back-up the data to.

The only other alternative would be to import part of the video into iMovie (and your internal drive), then save the 'clip' on the external harddrive, free up the space on your internal, and then do the next clip.

When you're done, you can add the clips back into your iMovie project and then edit them on the external drive...

However, this will be a lot more cumbersome as your clips will be quite short, and there will be a lot of plugging and unplugging to do...


Sorry!

Hi there, the way to get around your problem i see is to maybe buy of these Lacie D2 external hard drives. I've got 2 of these ones, a 160gig and 250gig one. You can hook a dv cam straight to one of these lacie hard drives through firewire, import straight onto the hard drive, and then when you're done, hook the hard drive up to your iBook, open up final cut or whatever you're gonna use to edit and you've got all your video clips ready for editing. These are triple interface hard drives, you can use firewire 400 & 800, and usb2.0. Hope this helps you.

Great solution citystar!

That should be just the ticket!

Thanks guys for the advice!!!! I'm definitely interested with the LaCie D2 Triple interface hardrives.

* Citystar is there a significant difference between the Lacie D2 "HARD DRIVE Extreme" Triple interface and the normal triple interface hard drives. Just curious...

Thanks again!!!!

It would probably be cheaper to go out and buy a big drive on sale somewhere (200Gb Maxtor drive, $159 ComUSA), and a USB2/FW case ($69 at Frys) than to buy the one he pointed out. Just look for stuff on-sale, particularly HDDs....

$229 = Tax vs $249 + Tax, less if you find the drive cheaper.....

baggss said:

It would probably be cheaper to go out and buy a big drive on sale somewhere (200Gb Maxtor drive, $159 ComUSA), and a USB2/FW case ($69 at Frys) than to buy the one he pointed out. Just look for stuff on-sale, particularly HDDs....

$229 = Tax vs $249 + Tax, less if you find the drive cheaper.....

Click to expand...

I agree. If you're not planning on upgrading to a new system that can use Firewire 800 and USB 2, then a drive with Firewire 800 and USB 2 would be overkill. All Firewire drives that I've seen have dual firewire ports, so you would be able to plug in your camera with any of them.

As baggss indicated, building your own can save a lot of $$$. I recently got a 160gb drive for $50 AR. Already had an enclosure for it, but you can get one for under $50. DealMac always has listings for them. http://dealmac.com/

Thanks for the Link immdb, gotta keep an eye on that place....

Thanks guys for giving me more options. I'll look into it. I'll see if I can find cheaper HD's. Thanks for the links!

Hey, I am having the same problem. Yuu might be able to jack some info off my thread on the topic:

http://mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21351