Can I use External Hard drive to Capture DV?

[hhamzeh]

Hi All,
I am thinking of buying a new hard drive and I am wondering if an external hard drive can handel capturing (mostly DV capturing) without droping frames. I know that IDE hard drive were recomended before for capturing. but now that we have USB2 external hard drives or fire wire hard drives, can these high transfer data external hard drives perform as well as IDE hard drives? I am particularly intrested on USB2 external hard drives and usually capture video from my mini DV; however, I might want to capture MPEG files via a captue card as well. Any sugestion would be appreciated.

[flyingmonkey35]

hhamzeh,

from the resarch i have done. i would not recommend it.

if your just using the drive just for capturing a internal drive is allways the best.

of course you could go with a ext drive.
to do this you can capture on your main harddrive the transfer files to you ext hd as needed.

good luck

monkeyboy out

[Karate Media]

I have an Iomega 80GB USB 2.0 external harddrive that I use often for capturing, and never experience any dropped frames or any other problems with capturing video (except those that are my fault or due to poor quality original sources). I really like the idea that when I eventually upgrade my system, there'll be one less thing to hafta pull out of the computer

I capture analog video using a Dazzle DV Bridge, and have a Win XP Pro machine w/ a 1.9 Ghrtz P4 and 768 MB RAM. I have used these captures for both personal and professional uses.

That said, to be honest, I AM eyeing the Western Digital 120GB Caviar drive w/ the 8MB cache as a second internal drive, not only for extra storage, but also to use for capturing -- like I said, I've never had a problem w/ the external drive, but something just makes sense about capturing internally -- maybe it's just the voodoo...

So...I can't give you hard numbers, just personal experience: no problems so far capturing w/ an external USB 2.0 drive.

[hhamzeh]

Thank you very much guys for your respond.

[txpharoah]

You'd get dropped frames probably on anything not 7200 rpm and not internal.

[holistic]

Can I use External Hard drive to Capture DV?

Yup . USB2 (two NOT 1.1) or Firewire will do the job.

Keep in mind DV is ~ 3.7 Mb/sec .... yawn ......... even an ATA66 drive spinning at 5200 RPM can handle those kind of low transfer rates.


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[jennyandgreg]

I thought DV was 10.0 mb/sec?

Can I use External Hard drive to Capture DV?

Yup . USB2 (two NOT 1.1) or Firewire will do the job.

Keep in mind DV is ~ 3.7 Mb/sec .... yawn ......... even an ATA66 drive spinning at 5200 RPM can handle those kind of low transfer rates.


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[fingernailX]

I have 2 identical 40gb Seagate Barracudas, one internal and one external USB2.0. I get a higher score on the virtualdub disk benchmark with the external drive. Never a problem with either for vid capturing. Go figure.

[kazzer]

I use an external Maxtor external firewire hard disk (7200 rpm) for video capture, and have had no real problems with dropped frames with good source video.

You'd get dropped frames probably on anything not 7200 rpm and not internal.

I don't agree with this. From my experience so far, source video quality is the biggest factor when it comes to dropped frames.

I use a Canon MV550i MiniDV cam as a bridge, and I only get some dropped frames with very poor VHS.

Hope this helps!

[The village idiot]

I capture DV to an external on firewire from an old PII 266 notebook all the time! Never any dropped frames even after hours of continuous capturing!

[metageek]

I capture to an external firewire drive without a single dropped frame yet. The HD is a Western Digital 80 Gb, 7200 rpm. The capture device is a Canopus ADVC100.

[holistic]

I thought DV was 10.0 mb/sec?

Sorry, you thought wrong !!

Have a read :

http://www.creativetomorrow.com/datameasurementchart.htm

Note : be careful not to confuse bits and bytes.

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