External Hardrive

[nate_dog]

Does anyone use these for storing those massive rough footage video files?

I just got a 120GB PINE external USB hardrive and I just tried it out.

So far, I can't capture to it because it can't go 2 seconds without droping frames and skipping. It takes 20 minutes to move a 1.5 GB file to it, and when I try to edit the clip on Premiere it stutters.

This sucks. Is it because a USB can't have that much go through it at once, or is it that the hardrive itself is slow?

[windowslaws]

is it usb 1.1?

cos i'm guessing that would be your problem, i only say that from limited knowledge but firewire transfers at 400 (Mbps?) as opposed to 1.5/12 Mbps (don't know which one) for usb 1.1

which isn't fast enough for dv capture i would presume.

if you can use a firewire connection to the drive that will work otherwise you could only use it for storage.

[assyrix]

I am using an external 200GB firewire/usb hdd connected via a Swann PCMCIA firewire-card to my wife's laptop (which has only USB 1.1, and then it takes about half a day to copy a GB across so forget it).

I capture video using the same adapter onto the internal 60GB hdd in the laptop (I upgraded it for ?130 iirc since the previous 20GB hdd went belly-up) and then move it onto the external hdd. Capturing and storing it at the same time on the firewire disk doesn't work.

The limit here is not only the firewire/usb but the internal PC architecture. Realtime playback of uncompressed D1 files doesn't work on any PC I tried so far even when you are using a dedicated FC adapter unless you have a special accelerator card along the lines of Quantel's iQ. Hence I use an SGI Octane for editing. Far cheaper than the Quantel stuff. Haven't looked back since.

[o2pb]

Use the external drive as a storage, not as a capture drive. Unless you have USB 2.0 even then, I don't recommend it. Capture a clip, and move it to the external drive.