Internal vs External HD -- which faster?

[portrower8]

I read in places here that Serial ATA is in 100, 133 and a couple other formats.. I read this means it transfers 133mb/s, for example.

So, an external HD, like Lacie d2 200GB FireWire 800 & USB 2.0 External Hard Drive which supposedly is 800mb/s through Firewire b ---

so is an external firewire HD faster and better than an internal hard drive?

and what about SCSI? Isn't that another kind - how fast?

what should I get for video editing and dvd authoring?

[leavemealone2k]

i have a 30GB USB 2.0 external drive, i use it just for storin movies on, i dont access it at all when i encode, USB 2.0 transfer rate is 480Mbs firewire is 400Mbs. therefor i have found internal HDD's to be faster and use them for encoding.

if any one knows different feel free to prove me wrong

hope this helps

[holistic]

I read in places here that Serial ATA is in 100, 133 and a couple other formats.. I read this means it transfers 133mb/s, for example.

You read wrong - serial ATA is designed for plus133Mb/sec speeds but due to hardware limitations it is comparable to good IDE drives.The 133Mb/sec is theory (max burst write) - In reality you will see approx 60 Mb/sec sustained writes for the better drives and maybe 100+ burst writes if system is tweeked.

So, an external HD, like Lacie d2 200GB FireWire 800 & USB 2.0 External Hard Drive which supposedly is 800mb/s through Firewire b ---

That is 800megaBITS - divide by 8 to get 100MegaBYTES - therefore slower. - answers lower question

so is an external firewire HD faster and better than an internal hard drive?

and what about SCSI? Isn't that another kind - how fast?

SCSI is king - faster spin (WITH SAME AUREAL DENSITY) equates to faster writes. BUT it is very expensive and unless you are doing professional video it is not necessary.

what should I get for video editing and dvd authoring?

DVD authoring is a function more of memory and CPU since it involves taking raw video and audio and forming it into a file structure readable by DVD players.
Video editing also is PROCESSOR and MEMORY intensive, although LARGE capacity drives are essential.
The only time you will really see any noticable difference between todays 133IDE drives and SCSI (or an IDE RAID array) is if you are doing full screen uncompressed analog captures. These type of captures take up over 25+ Mb/sec in data transfer.

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[SIRCOOKS]

honestly i have tried both. i have a 10gb maxtor in usb 2.0 enclosure and i actually got a 1.5 hour movie encoded on there in 2 hours once. I own a p4 2.0ghz 1gb ddr ram 500mhz fsb comp, i thought that was pretty good. But nothing beats encoding it in somewheere like my documents, and when you are encoding, if your running xp, shut down all programs, and go in to the process manager and set the priority to real time, as well as set tmpgenc task priority to high as well aiight...holla back

[The village idiot]

If you really need fast external storage look at firewire800 raid, it will be cheaper than SCSI raid if you really need 100 Mbytes per second sustained transfer. But SCSI RAID is still king!