An external hard drive serves three crucial purposes:
- It gives you mobility. Build your video projects onto the external and you will be able to edit off of any available machine. You will be able to move into the sound room for your sound mix. You’ll be able to move into the small edit lab for final color correction on the high quality monitors.
- It gives you a natural opportunity for backup protection. At least once a week, copy the contents of your active project onto the workspace drive of one of the edit machines. This way your data is better protected from loss.
- It gives you a place to archive your work at the end of the semester. Edit machines are wiped clean after each semester. An external drive allows you to carry an editable version of your project with you beyond the end of the semester.
We recommend the following USB 3.0 drive :
http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-drive-mobile-usb
If you have an older laptop though and you will be switching back and forth between the labs and your laptop you will want Firewire 800 I/O as well. Macbook pros started shipping with USB 3.0 in June of last year so you may not have USB 3.0 on your laptop. In that case we recommend:
http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-drive-mini
0G02576 – the 1TB USB 3.0 model.
Students can get 10% off on either model here:
http://prod.g-technology.com/edu/
If you want to shop around and get your own model these are the minimum requirements:
1TB
USB 3.0 (Firewire 800 if you have an older laptop)
Bus Powered (powered via USB)
7200RPM (This isn’t super important but helpful for editing off of the drive)
Format as ExFat (This allows compatibility on both Mac and Windows operating systems)