S4000 or S4000 Pro

[Charles]

Curious as to difference between the two apart from hardware has anyone on the forum purchased the S4000 or did everyone go for the Pro model

[LouBruno]

S4000 is good for budget minded individuals. However, the "S" 4000K is faster and has more HD internal space. We have sold only "S" 4000 Pro models in our shop so far.

[Charles]

Thanks Lou, speed is not an issue as i very rarely have pressing deadlines to meet and i believe MS are working on giving us the option to use ex-drives with the o/s on it,any comments from users of the standard S4000 would be welcome.

[TimKennelly]

I have not seen anything more on the ability to use external drives with the operating system on it since the initial mention of it.

I am reminded of a similar promise to be able to direct access citidisk external drives on the Solitaire which never, ever materialized and am beginning to wonder if this is going to go that similar route of vaporware promises. . .

What with the S4 and S4P not having removeable drives this is more of a concern than it was on the Solitaire.

[PaulBusta]

Yes Tim I agree with you about them not designing the 4000 with removable HD's. Sure the sleds would have to be redesigned to work with the SATA drives but it would have been worth it. In my book it's so much better then the hassel AND expense of the new external HD's. The way they "crammed" all the components into the 4000s box is unbelieveable. By making the box a little bigger they would have had the room to put a removeable HD sled in there. The removeable sled was the best design feature they ever came up with.

[Charles]

Thanks Tim & Paul which leads to another question will one be able exchange the 500gb drive for a larger one ?

[PaulBusta]

From the factory, I don't think so and if you open the box to do it yourself that would probably void the warranty. And, that HD is really burried in there, from what I saw you have to unscrew the dvd drive and move it out of the way to get at the screws to unscrew the HD. That's why I wish they would have made the box bigger so they could have made it sled swapable. Now we have to shell out $300+ bucks for a $150 dollar 1T HD.

[TimKennelly]

Well, if they come through with the promise of being able to edit on external drives I have no issue with the set up.

I have a Vantec NexStar external hard drive dock that runs for under forty bucks and you just pop in bare SATA drives and it's ready to rock and roll.

I like it so much I added a second one for my PC.

Right now with the S4P it's only for the backup process which is Ok as far as that goes, but I'd much rather be able to use them for direct editing to be able to easily swap and store projects.

[ShadowVision]

I'm 100 percent on the external harddrive for editing purposes. If they enable that, you could do a mirroring of some sort which would be a complete project backup. The inability to do a complete project backup is the most frustrating thing about the macrosystem product. It makes me worry all the time about a drive failure.