Formatting Western Digital 1TB Drive for Mac
If you have a family it is likely that you have mini DV tapes or even 8mm (how old is that) tapes cluttering up every drawer in your home. After switching to a Mac, I vowed to conquer the tape clutter and get my memories orgaized.
The first step was to find a suitable external drive to hold all of that media. My requirements were simple:
- large capacity hard drive
- firewire 800 – this one was key, if I wanted to import directly from my camera onto the hard drive I needed to connect both the camera and the hard drive to my computer. My video camera uses a firewire 400 to connect. Because my Mac only has one firewire 400 port, I needed to make sure that my chosen external hard drive was capable of using firwire 800.
The choices were many, and I read through several reviews to come to my decision. Ultimately I chose the Western Digital My Book 1TB Premium Edition II Triple Interface (model WD10000C033-001). This external hard drive met my requirements. In addition it is a RAID drive – which means that there are two 500GB drives enclosed in one case. I have the choice of running the drive as RAID 0 in which case all of my data will be spread across both drives and I will get close to a 1TB capacity. However if one of the two drives fail then all of my data will be lost. Alternatively, I can choose RAID 1 and all my data will be stored to one of the drives and a copy of my data will be stored on the other drive. Thus, if one of the two drive fails then I will have a back up.
To be continued …..
iMovie ‘08 Tutorials
Since I have been using an Apple Mac laptop, my internal hard drive does not have much space. So, I have spent the better part of the last week transferring years of family video footage onto an external hard drive using iMovie ‘08. Not having much experience with iMovie ‘08, I was a bit afraid of what the next step would be. How to actually turn all those clips into a movie.
I haven’t really gotten to that point yet but I did come across these iMovie ‘08 tutorials at the Apple website. Despite Apple being extremely user friendly, I wasn’t born with the knowledge of how to use these software applications so I always welcome a good tutorial.
Hopefully, I will have an awesome finished project in iMovie ‘08 before the week is out!