fos
05-21-2010, 08:51 PM
After purchasing Final Cut Express for my iMac, I found that an external hard drive for the media files would improve processing performance. An eSata drive would have been best but the iMac only has usb and a Firewire 800 ports.
I checked around and purchased a LaCie 1 TB drive with 7200 rpm, Firewire, USB 2.0, and eSata with all of the cables included. It was $163 shipped from Amazon. It has a three year warranty.
So far, it is working very well. Installation was plug and play. Upon initial start up the install software asked for the format preference and whether I wanted to use it as a backup device. There is a noticeable increase in performance and the extra space is a major benefit now that I'm working with video. The quality is very good. The housing is ribbed aluminum that matches the iMac. Since it has passive cooling, there is zero noise. After using it for a full day, it was just warm to the touch.
Additional drives can be daisy chained with the firewire 800.
So far, I'm impressed.
Jeff
I checked around and purchased a LaCie 1 TB drive with 7200 rpm, Firewire, USB 2.0, and eSata with all of the cables included. It was $163 shipped from Amazon. It has a three year warranty.
So far, it is working very well. Installation was plug and play. Upon initial start up the install software asked for the format preference and whether I wanted to use it as a backup device. There is a noticeable increase in performance and the extra space is a major benefit now that I'm working with video. The quality is very good. The housing is ribbed aluminum that matches the iMac. Since it has passive cooling, there is zero noise. After using it for a full day, it was just warm to the touch.
Additional drives can be daisy chained with the firewire 800.
So far, I'm impressed.
Jeff