Requirements for an external scratch disk

Hi guys
I am looking into buying an external hard drive to use as a scratch disk for editing. I was wondering what the requirements are for it to work as a scratch disk.
Thanks

Sorry Luke to correct, but Firewire is the way to go. USB2 does not guarantee sustained data transfer as video requires. Even though some posters claim they had no problem with USB2.
Even though slightly more expensive I'd always buy firewire for video.
Piero

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HDV editing from an external scratch disk?

I use FCE to edit High Def video from my HCR HC1 and at the moment have my scratch disk on my internal hard drive. In the past i stupidly put it on my USB 2.0 external hard drive but quickly found i had problems with dropped frames etc. during playback. Can anyone give me feedback on using an external fire wire hard drive for a scratch disk (with HDV) and playback results/any problems encountered?
Thanks.

Hi Ross, I don't currently use an external scratch disk, only my internal 500Gb disk, but my experience may still have some relevance. My external 250Gb USB is used purely for copying files around via Finder.
I use two HCR-HC3 camcorders to do multi-cam edits. I have found that I get an occasional dropped frame during playback, especially if I am scubbing the timeline too agressively, or have another app in the background.
Good luck with the comments from other folk.

USB Recording - requirements for the external USB drive

What are the requirements for the external USB drive to be recognised by the TV?
I've tried two now, which can both be seen by the TV to show media, but neither are recognised by the TV to be used as USB Recording space.

Hi,
I have a similar question.
I have a 40L6353 and I cannot seem to playback anything recorded onto USB.
I have tried a large 500 Gb Toshiba (USB powered) drive and 2 or 3 others such as an 8 Gb SanDisk and a smaller capacity non branded 500 Mb stick.
All of the above I have formatted in the TV. When I press record the pop-up staes that recording has started and when I press stop it asks me to confirm. When I go to the recorded list it shows the files but says that they are an unsupported file format!!
I can play videos and music transferred to another Toshiba 500 Gb drive by PC.
I have also tested the sticks and they pass the 2 on-screen tests and I believe when a stick is inserted I can pause live TV.
Does anyone have any ideas?
I have been trying to get this to work for over a week - if there is a fault I will need to go back to the vendor but I want to be sure it isn't operator error.
Thanks in advance.
Message was edited by: banzai

Best External Scratch Disk for iMac?

I'm a new Mac user and i'm now using my iMac as my primary computer. I've been looking online to find out which approach is best when using adobe products that require scratch disks. Should i use external USB or Firewire interface? What I've done for my windows system in the past is I purchased a 10,000rpm hard drive and dedicated it as a scratch disk and installed it internally. If I do this with either USB or firewire, my big plan is I would go and get a 10krpm hard drive and by an enclosure with usb and firewire. Anyone know how I should approach this on an iMac and will my plan work?
Thanks!

You could go with an external Firewire 800 disk and a 7200 or faster drive. But that won’t be as fast as your iMac’s internal drive which is SATA II 3Gbps. You could partition the internal drive so that you have one ‘work’ drive to be used for video/graphics scratch files. At least I did that. Bit of work ahead of you though since your internal drive currently is likely just one big partition. Post back your conclusions.

Internal hard drive for use as scratch disk

Am running OS 10.4.11 on a dual core 2.3 Ghz PowerPC G5. Want to install a 2nd internal hard drive for use as a scratch disk w/ FCP and for my media files, etc. Given that I can only accomodate an SATA I drive w/ 150 Gbps transfer rate what might some decent choices be for a 500 Gb to 1 TB drive suited for video (and a PowerPC G5)? I'll also be adding an external drive for backup if anyone has any suggestions.

Thanks for the recommendations. I had been looking at the Hitachi CinemaStar series but you have to reset the drive to SATA 1 for use w/ a G5 PowerMac. Resetting the drive, according to Hitachi, can only be done on a PC which I don't have access to. And I think that holds true for all their drives that are not strictly SATA 1.

Suggestion For An External Scratch Disc needed

I have recently learned that I had my scratch disc set up incorrectly to the same internal SSD in the Mac Book Pro. I assume that to keep the maximum transfer speed I need and external HDD or SSD with FireWire 800 instead of USB. I have found a few of those but they are much larger than what I need in GB and physical size.
I need something portable and reliable since I do most of the work on the road.
Thanks for your suggestions.

Have you considered a G-Drive mobile or G-Drive mini SSD? Both are bus-powered.
If you're ok using AC power, look at the G-Drive mini.
These are very nice units - small, reliable, good reputation.
FireWire (or eSATA if you have a MBP with an ExpressCard slot) is the way to go. USB generally cannot keep up with the sustained throughput required for video.

Photoshop external scratch disk to improve performances?

Hi
I have performances issues with Photoshop CS2 (and with LightRoom) on a 2.16GHz Intel iMac (45GB free disk space). This is perhaps due in part to the Rosetta engine. Small files are OK to work with, but when it comes to several hundred MB files, everything slows down. There are already 3 GB of Ram installed. I wonder if using an external (FW-800?) scratch disk could improve the performances? (What about a fast USB stick? Silly?) Or would I see a big change if I upgraded to an Intel written version of Photoshop? Thanks!
Paul

George,
I do not believe that having a second partition will reserve any particular area of the drive so partitioning the drive may not buy you much
Years ago there was this utility: FWB Harddisk Toolkit, which could set a scratch volume on the faster tracks of the drive. This was more needed at the time due to small size drives (9 Gb was huge!) and lower input/output. Nowadays, the processors, drives, memory and busses are blazing fast, but the resources needed to operate the OS and programs are way bigger too, and so are the digital camera files... One day shoot can easily reach 16 Gb of RAW files.
The idea is to keep your files stored on the external like you are doing but have the immediate files you are working on saved and opened from your desktop. Once you are finished working on it, copy it to the external then delete from desktop. If this is not going to work well for you the next best thing would be to get a FireWire 800 drive. The read/write speeds will be double that of the USB external.
Years ago I would spend $800 or more for a 500 Gb FW-800 drive for there was no other choice, but now when you need another 1Tb drive every 6 months or so, the FW-800 are still relatively expensive and the USB-2 very cheap! ... And so is the iMac in comparison to a MacPro! I suppose that I get what I pay for.
Thanks!
Paul

External Scratch Disk?

I notice in CS4, that in the Performance Preference, Photoshop is giving me an option to use my 2 external drives as scratch disks. Is it now okay to do this? If not, what happens if you do?
Thanks!

Of course Photoshop allows a scratch disk on a non journaled drive. That is what we used before we had the option of journaled drives in Panther.
I thought all this was covered in the Adobe Knowledgebase regarding optimizing Photoshop performance but a second look indicates it is not. Adobe does not appear to make any distinction regarding journaled and non-journaled drives for scratch drive use.
In addition to journaled volumes, scratch drive performance can be affected by Time Machine, anti virus/malware scanners, background defragmenting (ie: Hot-File-Adaptive-Clustering), content indexing and any other odd process that runs in the background reading/writing to your drive.
Even when you disable all this fluff on your scratch drive partition, another journaled partition may still be stealing the attention of the drive heads. So I like to keep a dedicated, non-partitioned drive for scratch.

Best External Scratch Disk ?

I have a MacBook Pro with a 250GB drive and I wanted to get a portable external hard drive to store all my videos on and use as scratch disk. My question is, does anyone have any suggestions on which external drive would work best? I was looking at a 320GB Iomega eGo with firewire interface. My only concern is the data transfer rate, I don't want there to be any problems when I'm editing off an external drive.

Depends on the type of footage you work with. If it's just DV, any drive with FireWire 400 will work just fine (though you'll of course want to read reviews to determine one with good reliability. NewEgg.com is a good place to start). If you're getting into HD, you'll want FW800 at least. You may also want to use this handy tool:
http://www.digital-heaven.co.uk/videospace/
to calculate how big a drive you want based on how large your projects tend to run.
If you're looking for my personal recommendation, I've used the OWC Mercury Elite Pro for a while now and it's served me well.

External Scratch disk disappears when DV camera plugged in.

Tried searching for this but there are so many things it could be I couldn't find anything that helped....
Hello Everyone,
My Dad's new imac seems to be having trouble accepting his firewire DV camera.
He has an external Lacie hard drive connected to the iMac via FW800. This is his scratch disk for Final Cut Pro.
When he just plugged his DV camera in to the FW400 port of the iMac, the Lacie drive (it's partitioned in to 3) disappeared.
When he unplugged the camera, it re-appeared. We tried plugging the camera in to the spare FW400 port on the back of his external, but this made Final Cut think that the drive was set to "read only" which, doesn't allow Final Cut to operate.
The External drive is partitioned correctly. He's used it fine since he got it.
I am suspecting that it has something to do with the DV camera or the Firewire 400 (6 circuit to 4 circuit) cable. I'm actually away from him at the moment and he doesn't have a second cable to try out but his next door neighbor may do so he's going over to ask tomorrow.
The Camera works fine. The iMac is only a couple of weeks old, if that. It was a reconditioned model so I also suspect there may be an issue with the FW400 port on the mac.
Is there a way to check the integrity of the firewire ports?
Has anyone experienced this problem?
We are trying to eliminate things as we think of them so I will post back any results. Thanks for your time.
Double_ohh7

Studio X,
From your comment on Cartoonguys post I should mention that my Dad's DV camera is a Canon too.
We narrowed things down a bit and it backs up what you've said. With Final Cut closed down, and the DV camera off, the external drive is ok. Turning the DV camera on does not affect anything. Opening FCP does not affect anything. Upon opening the capture window however, the external drive gets ejected and we get finders "Device Removal" warning.
Based on what you told me I searched around a bit and found plenty of comments from people experiencing problems on a single bus. A lot of them seemed to be the DV camera not working alongside FW800.
The next thing we will do is;
1) reset the scratch disk to the Primary Drive and try to capture from the Canon DV camera.
2) try plugging the external drive in to the FW400 port of the mac and then daisy chaining the DV camera through the FW400 port of the external.
3) if that doesn't birth any success then I will try reformatting the drive as a single partition and try it via both FW800 and FW400. (Thank you Gary).
I have a G4 Powerbook and have daisy chained until the cows come home and never had a problem. I have a very fuzzy recollection of trying to capture some of my Dad's skiing footage once and not being able to do it. I couldn't swear on the finer details but this has certainly got me wondering.
Randy,
The "read only" issue confused me as I knew the drive WAS set to "read write". That issue only came up through Final Cut and only when we attached the Canon DV camera. If it happens again whilst we are trying out our options I will open info and check while it is all connected but I think it was caused by a bad relationship.
Studio X, Gary, Randy,
Armed with all your advice we'll play around and see what happens. Thank you very much for taking the time to help and putting us on the right track. We'd be lost without you!
I shall post all results...
Double ohh

PE6 +External scratch disk

Good evening,
just added (via PE6 Editor -> Performance ->F:\) an external USB scratch disk and now PE6 Editor refuses to open, error displayed:
Could not initialize Photoshop Elements because the file is locked. Use the 'Properties' command in the Windows Explorer to unlock the file.
1. There is no such command in Windows Explorer (WIN 7 Ultimate 64 Bits)
2. If I eject the USB drive then the Editor opens properly ??? but I cannot remove the scratch drive from the settings because it is not visible anymore. (viscous circle).
any hints or workarounds ??? Is it there a settings file somewhere that can be deleted or manually modified so the Editor does not try to open the external scratch drive ???
Workstation: 4GB RAM, internal 250GB HDD (2 partitions, OS:50GB, DATA:185GB usable/89.3GB free where the data and scratch disk are located)
Kind regards,
Luis
Message was edited by: scaigs

Hi John,
Ok thanks but this doesn't resolve the fact that I cannot use an external USB drive as a scratch drive.
Tried the Ctrl-Alt-shift thingy and well it never asked me to reset
Any hints anyone.

Search for perfect external hard disk enclosure / RAID1

Today, am using stand-alone enclosures connected to a Mac Mini (running SL) via FW400 and USB.
Am storing my media on a 2 TB WD Green HD and am looking for redundancy (RAID1) while keeping the form factor down (wife approval factor).
Plan to add a second 2 TB drive, but need to find the ideal RAID enclosure. Have been looking into this for some time, but when I find what I think will work, the reviews aren't very favorable.
Here are the requirements:
- Supports SATA drives (minimum 2)
- Hardware RAID1 support
- Firewire 400 (800 preferred)
- Low noise/low heat (passive cooling preferred)
- Power Management (turns off when HTPC is off)
- Small(ish) form factor (e.g. under 8" x 8" x 15" (H x W x D)
I'd consider using Mac OS X Software to create the RAID but have read too many reports that indicate it is problematic. Also considered NAS (vs DAS) but want to use the array as a time machine disk also so it would need to be mac friendly.
Can any one chime in with some hands-on recommendations for an enclosure/RAID1 that meets my requirements, or experiences when using software RAID1 on the Mac?

Langley James Rock wrote:
Can any one chime in with some hands-on recommendations for an enclosure/RAID1 that meets my requirements, or experiences when using software RAID1 on the Mac?
Take a look here:
http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-safe.cfm
I have just ordered one. I have two G Safe drives, they work well with the Mac. They go to sleep (or not) according to the Mac settings.
I have ordered a third module so I can always keep a copy off site.
They are available 500 Gig to 2 Tb. Interfaces eSATA, USB, FW 800.
From personal experience I would not recommend software Raid for safety. My two excursions into software raid resulted in tears.

HT1553 how to change permission for my external hard-disk ??????

can't copy files from my mac to hard disk

You could select the 'Ignore ownership on this volume' box in Get Info for the disk - see below - unlock the lock first:

Best format for an external hard disk

Hi
I need to re-formated my WD 1TB external hard drive and was wondering what is the best file format to use (MS DOS FAT-32, Mac OS Extended Journalled etc)
All I store on it are all my videos, tv shows, and back-ups of all my work, documents etc, but I don't use it with time machine
Is one format better than the other for my needs?
Thanks
Andy

Frankless24 wrote:
How can I transfer something off of the drive that is over 4GB??
You don't transfer the file to a FAT(32) aka "MSDOS" formatted drive, partition or USB thumb drive.
The file is already on a drive that is formatted either exFAT, NTFS or HFS+ as it's over 4GB already or it wouldn't be there in the first place.
Drives, partitions, formatting w/Mac's + PC's

Sharing disabled for external hard disks?

After installing Lion, I find that I could not enable sharing for my external hard disks. I right-clicked each hard disk in Finder, checked the Shared Folder box and after I close the window and reopen it, the Shared Folder box is again unchecked. In System Prefs, I have already enabled File Sharing. Also, I could not do Screen Sharing as well. What could be wrong? I didn't have all these problems with Snow Leopard. Now my media player (on the same network) cannot see the two hard disks attached to my iMac.

If the external hard disk is connected via network, I found that if you connect to that hard disk through its IP address in a web browser and change it's folder preferences to (everyone can read/write), that will allow Lion to access the files.
I had the same situation, and this worked. You can use a program called Magical Finder to locate the IP address.
http://www.iodata.jp/lib/product/m/3022_mac.htm
The site is in Japanese, but the software has English support. Really easy to use, but you could probably use any kind of network scanning software to find the ip address.

Requirements for an external scratch disk

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