The Duc Pond

I want to shoot a mini-documentary of sorts when I visit Vietnam next month. I’ll have my parents talk about their experiences and whatnot and it can be something future Nguyen family generations can watch.

I’ll be shooting with a Canon HF100 that I’m getting for Christmas. Editing HD video takes a lot of hard drive space, though, so I recently ordered a Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II 2TB External Drive. It’s one of the lowest-cost 2TB drives available (especially when purchased on eBay with Microsoft Live Cashback), and has an eSata port which was critical to me for speed. It’s set to RAID 0 (striping) by default for speed, but you can change that to RAID 1 if you want mirrored protection.

Here are benchmarks (translated in English). It’s not the fastest, but for the price it’s good enough. These are the only tests I could find that compared its Firewire 800 performance vs. eSata.