Freeflow

Little Big Disk

LaCie Little Big Disk with Mac

When I first started editing video last year, I started out borrowing Alice’s Mac Powerbook 12”. We bought a copy of Final Cut Express and started reading.

The need for some sort of external hard drive quickly became apparent. Having read the dire warnings against using bus-powered drives, we started out with a LaCie 200GB d2 drive. This unit came with an external power supply and has performed flawlessly.


d2 Hard Drive

The downside, however, was when it came to travel and convenience. The d2 power supply is not the smallest item, the drive is astonishingly heavy (1500g or 3.3lbs), and the need to plug up not only camera, disk, computer, but two or three power supplies as well made it rather inconvenient.

Around 3 months ago, we were browsing around the Apple store at Bluewater, and spotted the Little Big Disk pictured at the top of this post. We bought the 160GB unit there and then and I’ve been using ever since for all video capture and editing. It came along on the trip to Wakatobi in April.

Although it comes with an external power supply, you don’t have to use it. That’s right, it can run bus-powered or externally powered. I’ve never yet used the external supply and nor have I once had a single dropped frame during capture or playback.

All-in-all, the Little Big Disk has been a big hit: it’s small, lightweight (650g or 1.4lbs), smart and convenient. The only concern I have is around the RAID 0 internal architecture (that’s how they achieve the high read/write performance): so, I guess that means the MTBF for the unit is halved – make sure you back-up!

Stephen · Tuesday, August 01, 2006, 15:23 · Permalink

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