My last film was 24 minutes long, edited on Premiere Elements. I used a Packard Bell 3500 Store and Save External Hard Drive (500gb). I only used a fraction of it but it kept over-heating and automatiucally switching off.
So I'm never buying one of those again!
I'm starting my next film and need to buy another external hard drive to house the project. So I'm looking for advise, please. Are portable hard drives any good, or do they overheat, too? I did an extremely processor intensive project on a 160gb Phillips hard drive and it never failed once. So I may go for a Phillips. I've read that external hard drives with aluminium cases are good at dispelling the heat. Is this so? Also, can you buy external hard drives with built in fans/cooling systems?
The best way of making an external hard drive is to use an internal PC drive, realistically either a Western Digital or a Seagate for an external - and then buy your own enclosure. If you live in europe the best ones to get are IcyBox IB-351s, but as far as I can see they're not available in the US.
I always have a small fan blowing on my external drives especially the aluminum case ones. They do help lower the temperature, I verify this by touching the external drive, with the fan it's warm without a fan it's very hot. Some of them I just attach a small 80mm case fan on them.
I have 5 external drives, only 2 came with built-in fans. You pay a premium for the externals that have fans. But if you have the ability to setup a fan to blow on your external, that can usually work to prevent overheating.
The said IB-351s are vented, and actually cool quite well. The larger two-bay 3220 I have has a built in fan which is very effective.
Cooling is crucial for external hard disk drives, but it doesn't always have to be done with active cooling, just intelligent design.
