I've been beating myself up for a pretty long time about this.
I'm good friends with the members of the IT department at my school. The one club i belong to does video projects using iMovie, and Final Cut. The problem is, each student has a login of their own, and as anyone who's tried it can tell you, myself included, saving a movie to a file server takes ages. What do you guys think would be the best solution?
Brenton
I've used firewire drives, and that is the best solution for me. They are pretty cheap if you get one of those firewire/usb2 enclosure(~$40) and stick mulitple hard drives in them(not all at once, though).
David
firewire is ok if it's in means of cheap, but big capacity hard drives...
if speed is important and money doesn't matter, buy bigger fire wire raid drives, there are some quite good ones with a fair price manufactured by lacie.
and if you are a really big spender (or recently won in the lottery) buy yourself an apple san...
chris
Could you not buy the cheap firewire enclosures, and then buy cheap high capacitor drives to go in them? Or would this be more expensive than just buying the bundle?
Or, just buy the cheap 5.25" enclosures and use the removable drive sleds like servers. That way you don't have to be taking them apart to get drives swapped, and you can lock down the enclosures to each machine, and also lock the drives in to control theft.
I'd probably replace any manufacturer installed lock with a better lock, or at least rekey it so you don't end up with 30 differnet keys. And have it keyed to something other than a standard skeleton key cut. Any lock smith can re-key the locks pretty quick. Heck, it only took 'em about 10 minutes start-to-finsih to cut a key for a cylinder out of a server I brought in that I didn't have a key for.
I have one of those cheap 5.25" USB2/FW400 cases. The removable drive enclosures that I have here are too deep to fit in the case.
Currently it is housing a Lite-On 8x DVD+/-RW drive, which really came in handy when backing up my music files from the hard drive of my flaky AIO!
i don't know about the prices in the u.s., but where i live it's cheaper to buy the complete bundle than buying seperate parts. a 250 gig hard drive in a firewire 400 enclosure costs about €216,00...