External Hard Drives

[kazzer]

Are external firewire hard drives suitable for DV capture/transfer?

Thanks in advance!

[kenmo]

How about USB 2.0 external drives ?

[kitty]

I won't say no but if the video is coming in firewire to a firewire HD then they are using the same bus and there are possible problems.

A firewire cap to a USB2 drive may work well but it depends on the PC architecture.

A reliable way is to cap to a EIDE/ATAPI Hard Drive. You can always use a Firewire/USB2 drive to backup the video afterwards.

[kazzer]

Thanks Kitty, didnt think about the bus sharing

[The village idiot]

Firewire to firewire works GREAT for me. Cuts down on the CPU overhead. Only problems are when you get something that has crummy chips on the same buss with something that has good chips. Example:

Razzle DV Bridge and hard drive in an ADS box. Razzle uses unknown chip (philips on TI) and ADS uses Oxford911, no good. Razzle device disconnects from 1394 buss. Now Razzle with box from Chump Screw Us ALL works OK, just restart after disconnecting the Razzle device. How a good box and a good capture device will work together????? In the working configuration, I can use my 266Mhz laptop for captures, using DVIO as the application, and cheapo CompUSA pcmcia adaptor!