I have been editing on pc with axp and lacie drives for the past 5 years. I am now making the switch to a 2.8 Macbook pro and upgrading to Media composer. I would like to start fresh with new external drives for work in HD/SD. I have been looking at the lacie 1TB eSata 3gbits D2 hard disks and G raid2 1000 g drive. Does anyone have any pros or cons on either of these? Should I be looking elseware? Plan on editing with P2 hd media and mini dv at times.

Any help would be very much appreciated

Thank you

At the risk of repeating mystelf again....run screaming fromt he LaCie drives.

No...really... that's just a biased point of view but I hate those things. We had more problems with LaCie drives than any other brand. If I were you I would seriously look at the drives from G-tech. Fast, reliable and a lot of options from which to choose.

Heat is the enemy of all drives and Lacie does not properly ventialte or cool theirs. In addition the quality control on the dirves they use in their systems is just poor.

G-Tech drives are ventialted for good heat dissapation. Their Raids are also fan cooled. Their quality control is excellent. We've been selling G-tech storage for over 5 years and the long term reliability has been superb.

We've been banging on a G-Speed eS unit with our DIY6 rig for almost 6 months now. It simply works and works.  In a RAID5 you get throughput speed and redundancy.

G-Tech just introduced G-Raid 3 with quad interface. Now you get USB, FireWire 400 & 800 and eSata. If your Mobo has an eSata port, this is a really nice solution. G-Raids are RAID0, so you don;t get any redundancy.

Gary
http://www.videoguys.com/gtech.html

Adding a third voice to AVOID LaCie.  The entire case is the heat sink, and that is not good.  Not for video work.

G-Raids...avoid.  They have issues.  G-SATA drives are good.  And plain G-Drives (quad interfac: USB, FW400, FW800, eSATA).  They have issues with two internal raided drives of late.  ANYTHING else connected via fiewire and performance drops from 85MB/s to 16MB/s.  Not good.

I am a huge fan of CalDigit drives, and currently am also using a Maxx Digital Edit Vault for media storage.  I like boxes with the QUAD interface.

I have to disagree about the G-Raids. Ran my facility on them for better than 5 years without a problem in a single set. Hands down the best built drives out there. I even tested several streams of DNxHD on them for Avid. they performed very well.

The ORIGNIAL G-raids I had no issues with.  I have two that are still in use.  It is the new G-RAID 2s that have the issue I described.  Daisy chaining with other drives, or adding a firewire camera or deck and their performance dropped.  I am not the only one to notice this.

But, if you use them alone, and don't have other firewire devices that you need to capture from, they are fine.

G-Raids (and G-SATA) are just Hitachi Ultrastars with good cooling. If I were you, I'd buy five of those (or Samsung Spinpoint enterprise class drives -- they spin up faster which is better for RAIDs) and stick them in a high quality drive enclosure or port multiplier. This one from Firmtek is among the best port muiltipliers:

http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/firmtek/5pm/

Thank you all for the great input. I was leaning away from the Lacie drives and now for sure with this info. Also was looking for a good express card/34 for the macbook pro. One that has firewire usb2 or400 and 800 to connect extra drives.  Any models that work better?