Hey everyone

I'm going to do a little post production work for a feature film, and will need to get a new external hard drive

for transferring files, exporting QT and Tiff sequenses for sound work and after fx and such, no editing involved.

The feature was shot HDcam, captured 1:1 on a Nitris 5.5.1.

I'm going to work on my new Dell 5110 laptop, with Intel i7, 8gb of ram and Geforce 525m, running MC 5.5.3

I have both Esata and USB 3.0. Has anyone had a preferd experience with either of them?

I really want to give the USB 3.0 a try...on paper it should be faster...

Any recommendations will be greatly appreciated!!

Thanks in advance

Edi

I would go for USB3.

had some bad luck with esata - never got hotswap to work on E-sata and sometimes the drive crashed.. and have never got them running again.

henrik

At this point they are pretty evenly matched in speed, one is higher for sustained reads, the other higher in random reads.

The advantage of eSATA is that the drives are native SATA so there is no translation (and possible loss of speed) necessary for the computer to read them.

The advantage of USB3 is that it has a higher power capability so you may not need to power external drives like you do with eSATA.

I have not tried USB 3 drives yet, but use eSATA daily without any issues.

vpcmike:

At this point they are pretty evenly matched in speed, one is higher for sustained reads, the other higher in random reads.

The advantage of eSATA is that the drives are native SATA so there is no translation (and possible loss of speed) necessary for the computer to read them.

The advantage of USB3 is that it has a higher power capability so you may not need to power external drives like you do with eSATA.

I have not tried USB 3 drives yet, but use eSATA daily without any issues.

 

All of them are correct.

USB3 drives are better in the aspect that you can have -even a WD Password like I do- them to

behave like an e-SATA in terms of speed.

For backups I use e-SATA because my old mobo at my desktop has no USB3.

But what really makes the difference is the disk you are writing or reading from.

If it's RAID 0 the spee will be very fast, if it's not, it will by just faster than USB2.

As long as the drive can connect to USB3 enabled systems, you should be fine. If going betweeb Mac and PC, the USB3 will not work natively.Just something to consider.

Michael

Thanks everyone for the great answers!!

George Angeludis:

If it's RAID 0 the spee will be very fast, if it's not, it will by just faster than USB2

George, I'm planning on getting a regular 2TB "WD essential", 3.5 inch usb 3.0. No raid involved (I think...)

Will this give me what you ment?

Thansk again!

What I mean is that you can utilize the maximum speed of the external drives (USB3 or e-SATA)

ONLY if you read and write from and to a very fast disk.

If you are using them to read write on a laptop 5400 disk you will not be very happy with the speed.

But again it will be faster than a USB2. Slightly.

Got it. Thanks.

Welcome.

Just FYI, on my Sony i7 laptop:

transfer data rate on an external, powered 3.5" 7200 rpm eSata drive:

and on an external (USB powered) 2.5" 5400 rpm USB3 disk:

Transfer rate is not the only factor to consider, access time etc are also important...

The external eSata 3.5" 7200 rpm drive gives somewhat better performance than the build-in 2.5" 7200 rpm disk of my laptop.

Note that USB2 disks have a sustained transfer rate of about 35 MB/s and FW400 about 39~40 MB/s (the interface is the limiting factor, while in the case of USB3/eSata, it's the disk that is the limiting factor, as suggested earlier in this post). DVSD or HDV is about 3 MB/s and DNxHD120 is roughly 15 MB/s + some I/O overhead....(note: things get MUCH more difficult of you read/write multiple video streams simultaneously (e.g. USB2 @ 35 MB/s will NOT be able to deal with 2 DNxHD120 streams in parallel))...

Because a normal 7200 rmp disk would never peak to the performance of USB3.0 or eSata 6gb/s, have anyone done some tests on a RAID0 that are capable of getting up to the peak performance of these connections?

I'm interested in buying an external RAID box with eSata 6gb/s or USB3.0, where can I find one that will enable me to stream uncompressed 1080 25p playback without problems? Or Red Epic R3D's at 5K? Is it possible? With a fast RAID to do it with these connections?

...and which one is best to work with together with a RAID?