Hard-Drive write caching,Is my hard drive faulty

[gadgetguy]

All things being equal, it shouldn't make any difference whether the firewire in on-board or a PCI card, but all things aren't equal or you wouldn't be experiencing dropped frames. I did a quick check at Asus (Click Here) and there a ton of bios updates and drivers for that motherboard. I didn't look through them to see if anything addresses this issue, but you should. If you don't find anything there or aren't comfortable updating the bios, then a PCI firewire card might make the difference.

[Nelson37]

The issue with the hard drive write caching is completely different from, and Totally Unrelated to, the Firewire card. While using a different firewire card may very well affect the capture ability, it will in no way affect hard drive performance.

The dropped frames are most likely a direct result of the write caching problem, lowered drive performance is specifically referenced in the technical explanation of the problem. This issue is very rare, I have only seen it two or three times. A second hard drive, unless it is absolutely identical to the first one, is extremely unlikely to suffer the problem. However, there is quite simply no way to predict this, it's a crap shoot.

Purchasing additional Firewire cards is unlikely to affect this problem and is most likely a waste of money.

A second drive offers multiple benefits and almost always helps to avoid dropped frames. Personally I would recommend an internal simply for economic reasons. Definitely not a USB drive.

[jezzer]

Thank you to both of you,I might update the bios but thats a bit to scary if things went wrong.

When i was talking about a fire wire card i wasn't meaning it might solve the problem,Like you said its got to be hard drive related,I was just seeing once i got another HD would it be any better to have a card,To me i couldn't see if there would be any difference in quality or ?? im happy what comes out when i do my transfer.

O just one thing if i transfer from my pc to my camera then i get no dropped frames,Its just when i do it from my camera to pc

[gadgetguy]

No, as long as the on-board firewire works, the resulting video will be no different.