rharder
Do not read this sign.
Though a fast drive for other purposes perhaps, I've been terribly disappointed with this combination for use with iMovie. Then again, I'm becoming more and more disappointed with iMovie even on my internal hard drive.
For $55 I picked up a Piranha FireWire enclosure, and for $160 after rebates I got a new Western Digital 120GB drive with 8MB cache. Too bad none of my files are less than 100MB! The cache does me no good. Oh well, it's cool, and that's what counts, right?
Using the 'dd' command, I get a steady 25MB/sec read and write speed, for file sizes from 100MB to 1GB. Not too shabby. Conclusion: Thumbs Up.
I copied 36GB of 100MB+ video files from my internal HD to the FW one in 25 minutes with the Finder. That's about 25MB/sec too. Not bad. Conclusion: Thumbs Up.
With my Formac Studio I can record two hours of Looney Toons without a problem and only hitting 50% CPU utilization. Conclusion: Thumbs Up.
With iMovie I frequently get continuous scenes broken up, and often the camera view screen will go blue in iMovie although I can hear the camera through its speaker still playing a signal. Of course iMovie also uses 100% CPU utilization: what's up with that? And I get these problems, though not as frequently, with my internal drive too. Conclusion: Stinkin' iMovie. Fix it, Apple.
OK so maybe I was a little harsh in my first paragraph, but seeing as how I bought the drive to use with iMovie "I stand by my disappointed grunt." Stinkin' iMovie.
Otherwise it's a really cool drive for about $200. You probably don't need to bother with the 8MB cache drive. Go for the IBM DeskStar 120GB for about $130 online. The Piranha enclosure is great: looks great and good price. http://www.piranhatech.com/products...atid=1047&subcatid=2132&manufacturer=Firewire It says $65, but came up as $55 in my shopping cart.
I have an 800Mhz flatpanel iMac with 256MB RAM, Mac OS X 10.1.5, iMovie 2.1.1. When my RAM-that-went-bad comes back in the mail this week, I'll do the iMovie tests again with 768MB RAM. Maybe iMovie doesn't work with 256MB RAM...
I'd be interested to hear how other people did with their FireWire drives.
-Rob
For $55 I picked up a Piranha FireWire enclosure, and for $160 after rebates I got a new Western Digital 120GB drive with 8MB cache. Too bad none of my files are less than 100MB! The cache does me no good. Oh well, it's cool, and that's what counts, right?
Using the 'dd' command, I get a steady 25MB/sec read and write speed, for file sizes from 100MB to 1GB. Not too shabby. Conclusion: Thumbs Up.
I copied 36GB of 100MB+ video files from my internal HD to the FW one in 25 minutes with the Finder. That's about 25MB/sec too. Not bad. Conclusion: Thumbs Up.
With my Formac Studio I can record two hours of Looney Toons without a problem and only hitting 50% CPU utilization. Conclusion: Thumbs Up.
With iMovie I frequently get continuous scenes broken up, and often the camera view screen will go blue in iMovie although I can hear the camera through its speaker still playing a signal. Of course iMovie also uses 100% CPU utilization: what's up with that? And I get these problems, though not as frequently, with my internal drive too. Conclusion: Stinkin' iMovie. Fix it, Apple.
OK so maybe I was a little harsh in my first paragraph, but seeing as how I bought the drive to use with iMovie "I stand by my disappointed grunt." Stinkin' iMovie.
Otherwise it's a really cool drive for about $200. You probably don't need to bother with the 8MB cache drive. Go for the IBM DeskStar 120GB for about $130 online. The Piranha enclosure is great: looks great and good price. http://www.piranhatech.com/products...atid=1047&subcatid=2132&manufacturer=Firewire It says $65, but came up as $55 in my shopping cart.
I have an 800Mhz flatpanel iMac with 256MB RAM, Mac OS X 10.1.5, iMovie 2.1.1. When my RAM-that-went-bad comes back in the mail this week, I'll do the iMovie tests again with 768MB RAM. Maybe iMovie doesn't work with 256MB RAM...
I'd be interested to hear how other people did with their FireWire drives.
-Rob