Video-editing requires large amounts of storage. Coincidence or not, hard disks are becoming bigger every day. With 400GB now available in mainstream hard disks, it is easy for OEMs to deliver more than 1TB of data storage in one disk case. The latest addition to this flock has been LaCie’s RAID offering, which is available in three sizes: 1TB, 1.6TB and 2TB. But not all big disks are created equal.

Most OEM storage offerings are based on a hard disk brand, a bridge board, and a specially designed casing. Those offerings that use generic casings are not considered for this article. This leaves us with products from Formac, Freecom, LaCie, NitroAV, WiebeTech, Miglia, Micronet, IOGear, and Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital.

Most of the hard disks covered here have at least a FireWire 800 connector on board. This gives them the capability to deliver theoretical throughput of well above 70 MB/sec. In practice, figures that high and higher are only achieved on the PC platform. The Power Mac G5’s FireWire performance is well under par --certainly when taking into consideration the importance of video-editing to Apple.

On the other hand, for really good performance FireWire 800 is insufficient. Fibre Channel and Gigabit Ethernet NAS solutions are much more appropriate for delivering the constant high-throughput needed for professional video-editing applications. No surprise then that Apple’s XSAN is such a success!

The average user will lack the funds to buy an expensive XRAID with XSAN thrown in for good measure. For those users, FireWire 800 will have to do. Even on Power Mac G5s a better throughput can be had at the expense of losing the ability to put the machine into deep sleep: you just connect a number of disks to different FireWire PCI-cards, so that the workload is distributed over the internal FireWire bus and the additional FireWire card. The maximum throughput thus achievable is something like 80 MB/sec; fast enough for most video-editing applications.

Big Disks

Most OEM vendors are selling big disks these days. 320 GB is no exception, with 1 and 2 TB being the max. In reality, these disks are not one 3"5 disk put inside a casing. They’re two to four disks connected to each other through a bridge board and seen by the OS as one volume through the use of disk spanning (or striping).

Spanning or striping are not very secure methods to increase available storage space, and therefore these disks should be looked upon sceptically. When using these disks, you should at least have a good backup strategy set up.

Formac’s XTR Platinum product range has two disks that use a spanning or striping method to increase the volume’s size. Typical, they are the 320 GB and 500 GB disks. Formac provides for two FireWire interfaces on these disks: one FireWire 400 and one 800 connector is present. The devices come with a 2-year limited warranty.

Freecom FHD-3 is not positioned as a video-editing disk, nor does it use spanning or striping in any of its configurations. The biggest disk is a genuine 400 GB hard drive. Interfaces include USB 2 and FireWire 400. This makes the disk too slow for serious video editing work. Tests have shown that the quality of Freecom’s offering is the best money can buy.

Iomega has a whole slew of hard disk products, including USB 2 and FireWire drives, network hard drives, and NAS. Of those, only the desktop NAS solutions can be regarded as viable solution for the high demands of video-editing. The Iomega NAS 200d Series come with Gigabit Ethernet and RAID capabilities. Capacity goes up to 480 GB, which is relatively low. The Iomega NAS devices have Microsoft Windows Storage Server on board.

LaCie offers a whole range of storage products of which some, like the Bigger Disk, use disk spanning, while others, like the new Biggest FireWire RAID disks, use hardware RAID 5, four disks and FireWire 800 or USB 2 to provide for fast and huge storage capacity.

LaCie’s Biggest RAID Disk is available in 1TB, 1.6TB and 2TB sizes. However, these are not what you get out of these disks in terms of volume size. Due to the security methodology used in RAID 5 (one redundant disk, checksumming, etc), you lose some of the space available. The 1TB RAID in reality can hold 600 GB of data, which still is impressive, given the peace of mind that comes with it. Everything is done on the hardware level, which makes these disks a good if not perfect choice for video-editing and other data-intensive applications. The Biggest Disk RAID system comes with hot-swappable disks and a hot-swappable fan.