Is this what a external hard drive case can do for me?

[rock13979]

Hello, When I try to capture about 2 hours of a vhs tape to my hard drive to burn to a DVD my computer tells me I dont have enough hard drive space. Could anybody tell me if I buy a hard drive enclosure and put 120gb's or bigger hard drive in I would beable to use it as a second and independent hard drive from the internal one now in my pc? If not what do I need?
Thanks in advance

[indolikaa]

You could. I'd recommend a FireWire connection, though.

If you don't have a FireWire port on your PC, you can buy a card for less than $25.00.

I don't know how well USB 2.0 would work in this situation, as I don't use it. I know USB 1.1 will not work very well. Been there, done that!

[zilog_jones]

If you only have one hard disk in your PC, there's most definately space for at least one more (if not 3 more!) unless you have some really small thing. And a normal IDE hard disk on its own is a damn site cheaper than getting another case thingy *and* a USB2.0 or FireWire card, not to mention the extra cables and stuff needed.

[WuphonsReach]

For capturing, I wouldn't recommend trying to capture directly to a USB or Firewire external drive. Put the 120Gb drive in as your primary drive and put the old drive in the external firewire/usb box.

Other things to watch out for:

- some external USB cases (and firewire?) don't support large drives (larger then 128Gb), newer USB enclosures do but it's not always obvious

- if nothing else, having the old drive in an external box makes for a half-decent backup system (get 2 or 3 and rotate them off-site)

[Gazorgan]

I use removeavle drive enclosures, as well as external USB. I don't have a lot of speed differences between being internal and external. Of course I have a new external enclosure that supports drives up to 250 GB. I also have USB 2.0 cards that properely support mixed 1.1 and 2.0 devices.

I routinely burn DVD's at 4x from files on a USB drive, so that gives you some idea of throughput. I can easily capture at full D1 in Huffyuv on an exteranl USB drive with no dropped frames (this assumes you don't have dropped frames on an internal drive :P )

Firewire has certain advantages. However, a lot of enclosures support both, so the internal parts are pretty much the same. A decent card helps. Newwegg.com has USB cards for $9 and enclosures for $45.