capturing to a external hard drive

[nanz1]

I have a 40g internal hard drive that I tried capturing to and it works fine with no dropped frames but that hard drive is to small for capturing bigger projects. So I purchased a 2.0 usb external case and installed a 120g hard drive that I want to use just for capturing. When I capture to the external hard drive a get alot of dropped frames. My operating system is XP and I have a Pentium 3 with 256mb memory. I'm new to video capturing and I'm not sure what I should check and what I should do at this point. I'm using DVIO to capture from my mini DV camcorder. Thanks in advance!

[andkiich]

I'd really stay away from the external drives for capturing high resolution stuff. I had a 100GB external firewire, and the best I could get it to do without dropping frames was VCD projects.

Install an additional, internal HDD and use that for captures.

[The village idiot]

That's very odd. I "capture" DV from my RazzleDVBridge to an external drive all the time. And I do it from a P266 laptop with DVio. There must be some sort of conflict between your camera, the hard drive box, and your firewire card. Certain boxes will not work with my DVbridge, I get lots of dropped frames and other errors.

What the answer to your problem is, I don't really know. You could try uninstalling the firewire drivers, and installing generic TI firewire drivers. Otherwise, try a different manufacturer for your hard drive box.

Hold on a second, you said USB2 didn't you? How about exchange the USB2 box for a firewire box? It could be that the USB2 controller is hogging enough resources to mess things up.

Try turning your antivirus off, and anything else that you have running. Disconnect from the internet if you have highspeed (unplug the cable), turn off any firewall software. Kill screensavers, all that stuff.

[nanz1]

Thanks for the suggestions,I'll give them a try.