Recommend me an external drive dock - must work with Avid/FCP

Hi,

Brief background: my wife is a professional freelance video editor using both Avid and FCP, I'm getting into photography but it's not my profession (yet). We're to the point where we need to manage our storage better.

She uses a MacPro, I'm using a Macbook Pro. I think an external drive dock will be appropriate for both our needs. It'll let her indefinitely keep all the media/content for finished projects, and will give us both a good way to easily store multiple copies of important files, with some offsite, long-term storage. She's currently got two WD MyStudioII drives that are full, no backups, and she's currently trying to decide what to delete to make room for new projects. (ouch!) Also, my LR3 library is all stored on my MBP internal HDD, though at least I have it backed up on a WD Passport.

We need a dock that will play nice with Avid and Final Cut - for streaming video in an out of these projects, bandwidth is crucial - obviously, USB2.0 is insufficient, and even the slower forms of Firewire are no good. I'm thinking about this USB3.0 dock which was recommended in this thread, but I'm not familiar enough with Avid/FCP to be certain that it will work; also, we'd need a USB3.0 add-on card for her MacPro. There's also this one which seems like a good deal, though we'd need to find an eSATA add-on card. Or, there's this one which adds firewire support so we wouldn't have to get an eSATA card.

My needs on the MBP are much more flexible. I don't mind waiting for my backups to run for a little while if I'm using a USB2.0 connection.

Any recommendations?


Cliffs: Want external HDD dock, must play nice with Avid and Final Cut Pro.

Well, we ordered the Voyager Q, after finding some information on other forums that indicated that it will work properly with both Avid and FCP. I'll post a review after we've used it for a bit.

We had to rush the purchase just a bit; she thinks that one of the WD MyStudioII drives is on its last legs ... unfortunate, really.

It looks like a good choice. One of the differences between Firewire and USB speeds is that USB is given in Burst mode, whereas Firewire is a sustained speed, so for large files, I would guess that FW800 would have the fastest overall transfer rate, given the same drives.

Good luck.

Since you mentioned AVID some of our editors at work live by the G-Technology products. We have a few G-Speed ES Drives which work very well with our media composer 5 editors. You can check it out at :
http://www.g-technology.com

Had no issues with them and work flawlessly with Media composer 5 and final cut, no matter what codec used.

Thanks for the recommendation.

The prices seem pretty reasonable for RAID arrays, but still a bit out of our range for the amount of money the business is making right now.