Help... can't daisy chain DV cam w/ 1394 ADS ext. enclosure

[Iceblade]

Hey guys,

I'm having an issue with daisy chaining my Canon Optura 20 DV cam with my ADS DLX-185 external enclosure. I am housing a 400GB Seagate Barracuda drive that is partitioned roughly 100GB/100GB/200GB in the enclosure. I am running WinXP Pro SP1 with 1GB RAM. My Asus P4S8x mobo has two 1394 ports on it. I have connected one to the ADS enclosure. If I connect my DV camera to the other port on my mobo, WinXP "sees" the Canon DV just fine and I can capture to my internal drives without any problem. If I try to capture to my external drive in the enclosure I get lots of dropouts in the preview window of WMM while capturing... and then lots of dropped frame and stutters on playback of the captured AVI.

I've spoken with ADS tech support and they weren't real helpful other than to tell me to try the external enclosure in another setup and see if it works.

Anyone have any ideas what might be going on here? The fact that when I plug the Canon DV into the enclosure, WinXP doesn't "see" it is rather disconcerting. The fact that if I don't daisy chain the devices, I get dropouts is even more disconcerting. Anything I can try other than a new enclosure? I don't have another PC setup I can test this stuff on.

Regs,
Jeff

[ofbarea]

Have you consider upgrating the firmware of your case?

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1277953&highlight=#1277953

[Iceblade]

I have not. I never stumbled across your post on that particular topic, despite searching for all things "ADS" and such. Thanks alot for the link to that post. I'll try it out later this week!

Regs,
Jeff

[ofbarea]

Just remember that for " PYRO 1394b Drive" cases you should use the oxford 911 firmware.

For " PYRO DV Drive" you could update it's firmware using Shining Technology, Inc. firmware for FW1256C CitiDISK DV.

[Iceblade]

Will do. Thanks for the clarification. I'll let you know if how the firmware upgrade goes and if it makes any difference in transfer speeds.

Regs,
Jeff

[rallynavvie]

Just curious: why do you have your external drive partitioned?

[Iceblade]

I did that to separate my media that is stored there. One partition holds mp3s, one video and one various install programs for all the software I run on my main boot HDD. No real reason other than that.

Regs,
Jeff

[redwudz]

I hope the firmware upgrade solves the problem.

I was wondering if the 3 partitions were acting like three separate drives to the Firewire controller and choking down the bandwidth or fighting each other for access along with the camera? On paper, Firewire should have enough bandwidth, but I don't know how it handles partitions.

I've had a similar problem with my laptop with a PCMCIA Firewire card and an external 10GB harddrive. When I plugged in my ADVC-100 to the drive's spare Firewire jack, it would see the ADVC but drop a lot of frames. Saving to the internal drive was no problem. Of course that's with a laptop and a Firewire card of questionable manufacturer.

[Iceblade]

Well, no such luck with the firmware upgrade. The upgrade utility fails to even recognize that a target device is connected... despite my seeing the mounted drive in Windows Explorer and being able to access the content therein. Any ideas on how to get the darn utility to "see" my external enclosure? I've tried various unpluggings and repluggings of the 1394 cable to get Win XP to re-see it and that doesn't seem to make a bit of difference.

Any help would be appreciated. I followed the upgrade instructions to the letter on the website.

Thanks,
Jeff

[Iceblade]

Sorry, the specific thing that the firmware upgrade utility says is "No Device Detected". I've tried every firewire port on my computer (2 onboard MOBO and 1 in my Audigy ) and they all fail to get the device to be detected with the upgrade util. I can access the HDD that is inside the external enclosure without any issues... just can't upgrade the firmware. Any idea how to get this to work, guys?

Regs.
Jeff

[Iceblade]

No one has any ideas, huh?

Jeff

[KenJ57]

I don't have any new ideas for you, but thought I would share my experience with Firewire devices. I used HDTune to check the throughput on my Maxtor OneTouch drive. Then, just turning on the power of my DataVideo DAC-100 A/D converter connected to a second port on my Firewire card caused a significant hit to the OneTouch throughput.

I use Adobe Premiere Elements for editing and Adobe recommends only one Firewire device connected for capture -- and no multifunction cards containing Firewire and other I/O such as USB. There has to be a reason -- the I/O speed simply slows down - more than you would think by looking at the specs.