The days have seen plenty of options for storage medium, such as the release of floppy disks, to compact discs, to digital video discs to flash drives. You get the picture. Currently dominating the scene are massive storage flash drives on the compact side, and external hard drives on the larger scale. And truth is, these two are becoming more and more similar every day, especially with the explosion of Solid State Media.
Historically, it has always been best to edit anything that will constantly require access to data internally. This would prove beneficial for many reasons, including:
1) Fast access to information
2) Faster speed drive ie. 7200rpm+
3) Convenience [location]
Originally, the external hard drive was limited to the 12Mbit/s of USB 1.0. Things got much sweeter in 2000 with the release of USB 2.0, in which the data rate jumped to a massive 480Mbit/s. This now makes it possible to edit off of an external drive with some sort of efficiency, but lets remember USB is still uni-directional at this point.
As always Intel got the jump on Apple, releasing the USB standard in 1996, after only 2 years of research. According to [1394 TA] documentation, FireWire was initiated by Apple in 1986, though development wasn’t complete until 1995, still a year before USB. Early versions of FireWire offered a 400Mbit/s transfer rate, which was actually slower than USB, but you must also consider that few USB devices actually saturate the entire 480Mbit/s. As of 2008, the latest version of FireWire [IEEE Std. 1394-2008] can transfer up to 3200Mbit/s. The fact is that FireWire is more efficient and requires less CPU.
/end history lesson
So why would you want to use an external drive vs. internal? Well, if you are like me, it’s not always convenient to edit in the lab. With more powerful laptops being released [thanks to Apple for getting the ball rolling on this], it is becoming more common for Editors to work from their hotel rooms, on a flight, in the kitchen, etc… With your work on an external drive, you can easily unmount from home-base, and then hook up to your laptop and you’re good to go. Workflow is one of the most important factors of a well-run business. The faster your turn-around, the more productive you can be, the more options for work become available. Anyhow, enough hyphenated text (moves to Shorter Oxford English Dictionary).
Another benefit of external drives is you can now keep your C: clean without having multiple internal drives. All of your programs can run on your C: and not have a bunch of files to deal with, which also increases performance. And holy cow, now we have external drives with eSata connections! That means at home, you have a direct connection to your motherboard, which is visually a 0% loss in performance. Some of these drives also have a FireWire and/or USB option in addition. The latest versions of eSata operate at up to 6.0Gbit/s…that’s 6000Mbit/s folks.
The most important thing of all, backup, backup, backup! One nice thing for those of us that shoot to tape, you have an immediate archive. At the very least, be sure to have your project files in more than one location at all times. Same goes with stills, or any data of importance for that matter.
Any imagery used in this article is courtesy of LaCie. This is not an endorsement of their products.
