I'm thinking of getting an external harddrive,does anyone have any opinions or experience of either firewire or esata connections ? I presume usb isn't really good enough for editing.
I'm thinking of getting the Seagate Freeagent Pro 750.
Thanks,Paul.

I use numerous large USB external drives (mostly Seagate, and some Samsung sourced drives) and find it works pretty well and is very flexible...things start to slow up a little when projects get very long (1 hr plus) and complicated though (many tracks and lots of FX's etc.)

I use Vegas 7e and do all my editing in 1080 HD (from HC1 and V1). I think the limitation is my PC processor as much as anything else (in a Dell Dimension 4600 with 3.0GHz Pentium 4 HT and 2.5GB of RAM) as it's only slightly better if I put the files on one of my two internal hard drives and work off that (each only 80GB...need to swap my Drive D for a 500GB sometime!)

For what I do it all works really very well though. However, I think the general opinion is go for ESATA if you have that option as that should be much, much faster than USB or Firewire - but I'm sure others with experience of this will let you know soon enough.

I concur with Andy - go esata if it's an option.


CS

all three will work, but...
1-usb is the slowest. it will work, work reliably, and have the least growth potential
2-firewire 400/800 comes next in the speed category. but, my experience with firewire is that it's flaky and unreliable
3-SATA 2 at 3Gb/sec is the fastest, most reliable, and there are many SATA port multipliers coming on the market that allow RAID configurations. after you have two or more SATA HD's, you can start RAIDing them, which helps a lot for file transfer speed when files get up in the Gb size.

Paul - I use external hard drives extensively with P2 files from an HVX-200, with Edius Broadcast as a NLE. All of mine are currently USB 2.0 connected, and I have had no problems. I did some tests a year or so ago, and in my set-up, USB 2.0 was slightly faster than firewire 400. I agree with the others, though, in that if you can go the ESata route, this would be the fastest. By the way, the USB ports are relatively immune to static problems, but firewire is extremely sensitive to static and you can easily damage firewire circuits if you are not careful.

Today i bought an internal esata connector for my pc,double socket,£5.esata it is then.
Thanks guys.
Paul.

For editing you can't do better than eSATA since there is no bottleneck and you are connected directly to the eSATA controller.
I was lucky enough to have a MB that came with an external connector to an eSATA port.
I never tried FW and I use USB for storage or file conversions.

Jim