IDE to Firewire Hard Drive Converters

[tkdaim]

Hello all,

I was wondering if anyone owns or has tried video editing with a hard drive to firewire converter kits like the ones they sell at Compusa, Circuit City, Best Buy, etc. The link shows and example of what I'm talking about. This one is by ADS.

http://www.adstech.com/products/PYRO1394DriveKit/intro/API800intro.asp?pid=API-800

I have a Western Digital 100 GB hard drive (which busted in 2 months, but WD is sending me a new one) that I use for editing and I was wondering if the firewire converter would allow for editing improvements like disk access? Any horror stories using these would be good to hear as well.

My system specs (not the greatest system but it's been good so far for my needs.):
Motherboard is Asus P2B
Pentium III 600 MHZ
1 GB PC-100 RAM
Matrox Meteor Firewire Capture Card
Dual Monitors
Mostly use Adobe products for editing, graphics, etc.

Thank you in advance,

T

[tonyp12]

No improvement over on-board ide port.

If you HD supports ATA100 and your Motherboard does not.

Solutions:

Get a new motherboard.

Get a ATA100/133 PCI card.

[sterno]

Actually sometimes you lose a little performance because of the extra overhead from the Firewire/UDMA bridge controller.

[The village idiot]

The ones from ADS work very well. The Chump USA brand does not work as well. I have my CD burner in an ADS, had my DVD-r/ram in an ADS, and an 80GB hard drive in a Chump USA. I'll be putting the hard drive in my now free ADS. The firewire chip that Chump uses is not very good. I sometimes have problems connecting that drive and any other device after it. Never any problems with the ADS ones, and they have a built in power supply and cooling fan.

NOTE: Your drive will be limited to ATA33 transfer speeds with the current boxes!

So if ATA33 is good enough for you, they work well.

[The village idiot]

Wanted to update this. I just finished changing my drive from the Chump Screw Us All case to the ADS case, and then did a quick speed check. With the Chump case I was getting a read speed of 12.3 MB per second and a write speed of 12.8 MBps. Now with the ADS case, I'm getting a read speed of 29.9 MBps and write speed of 17.8 MBps. The new read speed is about the same as my 18GB 5400 ATA100 Western Digital connected to the mainboard of the computer. So it is an impressive jump in speed. The drive in the firewire box is a Seagate 80GB 7200rpm ATA100 drive with a 2MB buffer.

Again, hope this helps.

Oh yeah, one more thing. I used a spare 80 conductor IDE cable with the ADS box. The old setup just used a 40 conductor cable which comes with the firewire box.

[BJ_M]

very good cases and firewire to ide convertors can be found here .. excellent quality and speed .. http://www.granitedigital.com/index.htm

[sterno]

NOTE: Your drive will be limited to ATA33 transfer speeds with the current boxes!

I think that some of the current enclosures do use ATA66-capable bridge controllers now. But I'm not sure that any of them support ATA100, and I'm almost certain that none of them do ATA133 (not that anybody else supports that, either). And it wouldn't surprise me in the least if a CompUSA-branded model bought today only did ATA33.

Manufacturers really aren't bothering to take advantage of Firewire for drive enclosures, and I'm certain they won't bother to take advantage of USB 2.0 either. I think the only high-end Firewire drive systems I've seen were an external multi-user RAID cabinet and a few high-capacity tape drives. Both seemed to be aimed at people using the recent Firewire-equipped Macs for DV work, the RAID cabinet even supported dual-path connections for Macs using a built-in port and an add-in board.

[The village idiot]

sterno:
I think you are correct. I did some reading last night, and it seems that the newest generation of "common" chips will support a faster drive transfer rate. Now if those would only hit the stores.

[JHebert]

The maximum transfer rate of Firewire/1394 is 400Mb/s or 50MB/s.
Therefore, even if a ATA-66 IDE/Firewire bridge converter were released it would not be possible to transfer any higher than 50MB/s maximum so you would not truly get full ATA-66. ATA-100 or ATA-133 would be out of the question. Same story for USB2 at 480Mb/s or 60MB/s. Actually in real use Firewire is a little faster than USB2 at sustained transfers despite the slightly higher rated speed of USB2.
However, Firewire has already standardized on a newer high-speed version called 1394b which will provide from 800Mb/s (100MB/s) up to something like 3.2Gb/s (400MB/s). It should be a better match for ATA-100/133 and future Serial ATA technologies.

[The village idiot]

Hmmmm.... Thanks, I wasn't aware of the newer standards.

[You_Are_Alive]

I just got a combo 1394/usb2 drive kit as well along with a PCI combo card. I am confused about one thing. You guys say you are getting >12 MB/s transfer rate which is confusing because as I recall when even looking at the ADS pci card it clearly says that it achieves up to 12 MB/s transfer. So what gives. Whats up with this 12 MB/s deal. The same was true with other pci cards I looked at. Can you guys explain if you know what the deal is? Or what programs are you using to test the performance. I'd like to compare our results, it may be useful as these drive enclosures are really catching on.

[The village idiot]

I tested mine with a utility that comes with the video editor I'm using. It is EditStudio from http://www.puremotion.com . It is maybe mostly subjective, and the only reason I posted those numbers was to show that the ADS enclosure works better than the Chump Screw Us All one I was using before that. The editor has a free 30 day demo if you want to try it. About a 10+ MB download. When you run the editstudio app, on the left hand side you will see a button for tools. Hit that then go to system info (I think) and you can then test your drives speeds. Also you might try testing with NERO and see what it says. I could do the same (after a VDub job finishes).

This is from the Comp enclosure from edit studio read-out:

EditStudio System Info
======================
EditStudio version: 3.0.15
EditStudio User ID:
Windows version: Windows 2000 (Service Pack 3)
Memory: 248 MB
Internet Explorer version: 5.00.3502.1000
DirectX version: 8.1
QuickTime version: 5
Analogue capture devices: Dazzle DVC II PCI Device
DV camcorder driver: Microsoft; DV Camera and VCR
Disk speed: R:\; Read: 12.3 MB/s; Write: 12.8 MB/s
Fast enough for any type of sensible video capture and playback

Camcorder make and version:
PC processor speed:
Firewire card manufacturer:

Oh yeah, forgot to say, I hope this catches on. Firewire is a great thing in my book. Apple was damn smart, and Sony for seeing it's advantages. Now reports that a newer faster version is on the horizon that will allow full ATA100 on beyond.