Storage Devices and Connections

Digital video can take up a lot of space. You need big hard drives, big removable storage devices, as well as RAID devices that play video into your computer fast enough to edit in real time. In addition, you need storage devices to capture video, audio and still images.

Finally, you need to connect your devices to your computer, and to each other. Sometimes, you have enough ports and sometimes you got to add more. This can include input/output (IO) cards for USB and FireWire, as well as hubs to add additional connections to your existing ports.

Connection Devices

Belkin Dual Media Reader/Writer - there are a wide range of digital cameras/camcorders and audio recorders/players on the market. Some use CompactFlash and some use SmartMedia cards. For only $60, the Belkin device reads and writes to both Type I and Type 2 CompactFlash cards, as well as to SmartMedia cards. It uses your USB connection and is compatible with almost any Windows or Macintosh computer system. Just plug it in and the USB drivers will recognize the device. Insert the flash memory card and your computer will recognize it as a another drive. Exchanging files is as easy as dragging and dropping. For $40, you can get the Belkin USB reader/writer device for MultiMedia and SecureDigital Cards.

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Hubs - Firewire & USB

Belkin provides a wide range of USB and FireWire Hubs ranging in price from $35 up to $100. You can pick from Macintosh and Windows compatible hubs, numbers of ports and connections. Hubs enable you to easily connect extra devices to your computer without overloading the existing device or requiring you to open up your computer and add in extra PCI or ISA cards for connectivity.

Pocket & Portable Storage Devices

There are a bunch of small and very portable devices that can be used for transporting multimedia, data and application files. These range from small memory cards to "key chain" storage devices to portable hard drives.

Check out the PocketDisk from IOPlus - simple to use and inexpensive key chain device -  PocketDisk allows PC and Mac users to share data in size larger than 1.44MB between any notebook and desktop system with a functional USB port. No more carrying around work in a laptop computer, no more floppy disks required, and no need to burn CDs. The PocketDisk is small enough to fit into any pocket and powerful enough to store text, presentations, spreadsheets and large multimedia files. Once plugged into the USB port, PocketDisk is detected by the host computer and recognized as a removable disk with no driver installation requirement (except on Windows 98).

Input/Output Cards - FireWire/USB

Adaptec provides a wide range of IO cards for both USB and FireWire. These enable you to easily add built-in connectivity to your desktop computer. Checkout the DVPics package which bundles video editing software along with three FireWire connections. Also checkout the new Adaptec DuoConnect Card. $115  Not only will it work with both Macintosh and Windows computers, it provides four USB 2.0 ports and three Firewire ports. It includes a 6-foot FireWire 6-4 pin cable worth US$30. MGI VideoWave 4 SE digital video editing software and Adaptec USB 2.0 drivers for Windows 98SE, Me and 2000 are also included. It has four USB ports (3 ext, 1 int), and three FireWire ports (2 ext, 1 int). It has full USB 2.0 high-speed certification and is USB 1.1 backward-compatible. Its FireWire ports are OHCI-compliant and can provide up to 18W of cable power.

Big Hard Drives - Mercury Elite 160

. The Other World Computing’s Mercury Elite 160 Gigabyte hard drive can solve many of your video editing and storage problems. This is a 5400 RPM hard drive with a 1394/Firewire connection. .With a list price of $349, this is a relatively inexpensive and very painless way to add needed storage to your system. The 160 Gigabyte model, with a rating of 5400 RPM, boasts a sustained write speed of 35.5 MBps and a sustained read speed of 36.06 MBps, suitable for capturing or playing back compressed video for editing. more