Which Hard Drive???

[MMc82]

I have a Dell Inspiron 6400 and I am wanting to edit my videos on it. I have installed Premiere CS4. I want to know what would be the best way to use this program efficiently... ie. FAST! Should I work directly onto a external hard drive? If so which one (hopefully around 100euro)
I am studying video art so this will be a long term set up and I will use it a lot. Help!!! : (

 

[paparazi]

External hard drives are convenient and pretty fast but an internally mounted SATA II drive will beat it hands down for speed. It really depends on how important drive mobility is to you.
I would recommend a Westerndigital Black Edition.
Martin

On wings like angels whispers sweet
my heart it feels a broken beat
Touched soul and hurt lay wounded deep
Brown eyes are lost afar and sleep

 

[vacunita]

Unfortunately the Inspiron 6400 is a Laptop, so unless there's an additional HD slot in the laptop (which I doubt) its unlikely you'll be able to use an internal drive at all.

You are pretty much confined to a large external drive, or replacing the factory default drive with a larger one say 300GB. You could then partition the drive as 80 or 100GB for the Operating System and the remainder for the Videos.

However I think an external USB drive would be the easiest most painless way to do this. Of course this should be paired with a good backup so as to avoid catastrophic loss of data should the external Drive fail. (and you can be sure it will fail at some point).



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Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[MMc82]

Is there a hard drive you could recommend? I have found one on the net, it is a iomega professional 500gb. Is Iomega a good make? But am unsure if it will be compatible... I have tried messaging dell but with no luck so far...
Thanks so much for you speedy reply!
Margaret

 

[vacunita]

But am unsure if it will be compatible

This should not be a problem. There's a reason USB stands for Universal serial bus, and that's because it universally compatible with anything.

I would stay away from Lacie. I've had lots of trouble with Lacies. They just tend to fail, I had 2 fail straight out of the box, it was ridiculous.


IOMEGA on the other hand its pretty good, haven't had any of their enclosures fail on me. I still have some external enclosures form old IOMEGA drives where the internal drive (maxtor or seagate) failed, but the enclosure still works fine, so you just replace the internal drive and are back in business.

I'd recommend Seagate if it weren't for the firmware issues that's plaguing them now. Otherwise they are pretty solid drives.

----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[goombawaho]

You can get smaller or larger sized (physically) external drives. I'd stick with the larger size because they will have a 3.5" hard drive vs. a 2.5" hard drive for the smaller size.

Why does this matter?? Generally speaking, you're going to get more disk space and faster performance in a 3.5" hard drive than a 2.5" hard drive euro for euro.

Why?? Because laptop/2.5" hard drives lag behind desktop hard drives in terms of disk space, rotational speed and access times.

Example:
320GB Western Digital External with 3.5" HDD

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136169

320GB Western Digital External with 2.5" HDD

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136332

 

[PROFESSORSPARKIE]

You keep saying "hard drive". If this is for data(video or otherwise) then consider a flash drive. I just purchased a 32gig flash drive for $49 at our Micro Center. That is a lot of data(about 4 basic DVDs equiv.) and highly portable plus it is very small "can you say thumb?"

Give it a thought.

professorsparkie

Computer thought: I teach a lot of programming so I can learn. You can never learn it all.