Which external hard drive for AVCHD footage?

[o'pal]

Recently I purchased Canon HF100 High Definition camcorder and now I need somewhere to store my AVCHD files and the external (possibly portable) hard drive of 500-1000Gb should be OK. I have an idea of taking it with me on vacation and over there transfer files from camcorder to hard drive. Because there are so many to choose from like SATA, ESATA, Western Digital or Hard Drive players I need your advice which one is more reliable and most appropriate for this.
Thank you.

[Monopot]

Originally Posted by o'pal

Recently I purchased Canon HF100 High Definition camcorder and now I need somewhere to store my AVCHD files and the external (possibly portable) hard drive of 500-1000Gb should be OK. I have an idea of taking it with me on vacation and over there transfer files from camcorder to hard drive. Because there are so many to choose from like SATA, ESATA, Western Digital or Hard Drive players I need your advice which one is more reliable and most appropriate for this.
Thank you.

If your going to store your files on an external disk then you really need something with RAID1 else if you lose the disc you lose your data. Only put data on a single disk that you afford to lose.

Personally for me, when I get an AVCHD cam (HF100 or TG3) I'm going to burn everything to 8Gb cards so I can drop the files straight onto a dual layer DVD. I'll then also keep them on an external drive so I have them in 2 places.

Eventually I'll get myself a dual disk enclosure which supports RAID1.

For an external drive at the mo though, I just purchased a 750Gb Samsung SATA drive and an IcyBox enclosure which supports SATA and USB2. Total came to £91 so quite happy with that and I'm using it for time machine backups at the moment.

[rhubarbe]

Now you see, I disagree with that. I built a RAID5 server a little while ago and it popped drives like there was no tomorrow. Rather than use RAID I suggest that you make two independent copies on two separate HDDs. The trouble with RAID, in my experience, is that the drives are continually being accessed by the RAID controller, and any weaknesses in the disks will be quickly revealed.

[Monopot]

Originally Posted by rhubarbe

Now you see, I disagree with that. I built a RAID5 server a little while ago and it popped drives like there was no tomorrow. Rather than use RAID I suggest that you make two independent copies on two separate HDDs. The trouble with RAID, in my experience, is that the drives are continually being accessed by the RAID controller, and any weaknesses in the disks will be quickly revealed.

RAID5 is much better, but for general home usage is a little overkill unless you have a lot of data which you need resilience on.

2 independant copies is ideal but it requires some sort of manual intervention to get the copies accross unless you script/automatic it with tools like robocopy or making clones with tools like SuperDuper. Apart from that RAID1 is the simplist and easiest method. If your using crappy drives though, then yes you'll get a lot of failures.

The data centre I works in currently has about 300-500 servers with god knows how many drives, all of which will be some form of RAID1, RAID1+0, RAID5 or RAID10 and we don't get many drive failures at all.

[rhubarbe]

I just use two batch files:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\Xcopy.exe "E:\Newsbin\*.*" "Z:\AUDIO" /s /d /c /a /y


REM: Transfer Newsbin music files to Drive 1 on NAS

C:\WINDOWS\system32\Xcopy.exe "E:\Newsbin\*.*" "Y:\AUDIO" /s /d /c /a /y


REM: Transfer Newsbin music files to Drive 2 on NAS

Works for me....

[Artois guy]

I use a RAID1 on my PC but also back up to an external drive using Microsoft one care which I have on the 3 main machines in my house ... overkill maybe, but the data is as safe as can be apart from the house burning down.

I was interested to read about using an 8GB card and then backing this up to a dual layer DVD... sounds like a great idea ... I only have one reservation and that is that there is said to be a "life" on DVD discs... how long would they last? ... tape is apparently much better so I have read .....

[rhubarbe]

I think you'd be safer printing the edited file out to HDV. I personally don't trust the dye on DVDs, for longevity, as far as I could throw something really heavy.

[Artois guy]

Thought as much ... this was my experience ... the DVDs that I burnt about 3 yrs ago don't like to play now (even the play station struggles to play them and that will normally find a film on a shirt button!)

with my previous MMV camera (Sony ip55) I used to edit film and save it as a .AVI file and then complile DVD from these files... it is really easy for me to now "re create" my old discs... just a pain doing all of the encoding etc etc ... and AVI doesn't half like to use up memory ... hence my 500BG RAID1 system !

[rhubarbe]

I've got videotapes that are 26 years old that play fine and 3 year old DVDRs that do nothing more than stop me getting rings on my coffee table.

[Monopot]

Originally Posted by rhubarbe

I just use two batch files:

Works for me....

Yeah thats the sort of thing I meant. We do this all the time at work with robocopy and its something I used to do on my XP PC to keep several copies on several drives.

Originally Posted by Artois guy

I was interested to read about using an 8GB card and then backing this up to a dual layer DVD... sounds like a great idea ... I only have one reservation and that is that there is said to be a "life" on DVD discs... how long would they last? ... tape is apparently much better so I have read .....

Originally Posted by rhubarbe

I've got videotapes that are 26 years old that play fine and 3 year old DVDRs that do nothing more than stop me getting rings on my coffee table.

Thats true there is a life on DVD. Personally (touch wood) I've not had a problem yet and still have DVDs with holiday video's on from 2000 and they play perfectly. But yes for now I'll be keeping copies on both DVD and an external drive so I have them in 2 places.

Backups are always best endevaurs anyway as there are always ways to lose data. A company a friend worked at had everything backed up each night, plus the usual raid setups and san etc. They had a fire which destroyed nearly all the kit, and yes, there backups were kept onsite

Keep you files in more than 1 place, both media wise and physical location and you should be fine.

[rhubarbe]

I have backups at home and at work. Still risky I know but you have to draw the line somewhere.

[o'pal]

Thank you for your replies. As I am not that good at computers I checked what RAID means. I think I don't need it, because I would only need to backup my video footage; I do not have any external hard drive yet and I am not going to construct hard dr. myself, so the question is still open for me:
Which external hard drive is most reliable?
Is there any I could switch off after files are on it and switch on when I want to use them?
And what do you think about Multimedia Hard Drives?

I'm a Mac, but shouldn't make any difference ...

I have a 500Gb hard drive in my computer. I edit my video files on an external FireWire 800 500Gb drive (faster than my internal one) - I have 1 500Gb drive which I use as a direct backup and a number of 1Tb drive which I use as permanent backups.
I also store my data on Amazon S3.

However next month I will get a drobo with 4 1 TB drives ..... to take care of "the in between" workflow.

I mostly do still photography (digital) and have over 250k raw images backed up. Now getting into video I realize I will need a lot more space....

Always a hassle figuring out the perfect operational and secure backup method

[crews]

I have a firewire "G-Drive" that works well. No problems.

I have a WD "My Book" 750gb external drive that does not support avchd video. I can not import directly to it through iMovie or copy avchd files to it from a local disk.

[A n d r e w]

Originally Posted by crews

I have a WD "My Book" 750gb external drive that does not support avchd video. I can not import directly to it through iMovie or copy avchd files to it from a local disk.

A zombie thread, but anyway . . .

There must be something wrong with your drive or the way you have it set up. There is no reason it shouldn't "support" AVCHD video, as AVCHD is merely a bunch of files like any other bunch of files.

Whether you can set up iMovie to use an external drive or not, I'm not sure. However at the very least you should be able to copy AVCHD files to your MyBook without issue.