My setup is XM2 to the only firewire port on my laptop, a 4 pin firewire port, but I want to capture to an external hard drive.
My question is if I use a firewire PCMCIA card to connect the external drive is that the slowest part of the data transfer.
CPU 2.7 with 512 RAM. Editing with Vegas 5.
IS USB 2 not fast enough for sustained capture rates?
What would be the recommended set up for a laptop with only the one firewire port?

Hi Colin,

Actually USB 2 is a bit faster than standard Firewire 400 so the sustained rate should be more than enough to feed the external HDD.

USB 2 is 480mbit/sec and standard firewire is 400.

Using a laptop the problems that may(with a big maybe) arise is that the internal data-bus architechture isn't coping with the load of reading fast firewire and putting it on the USB2 bus. But with a modern laptop as yours I don't belive that'll be any probs at all.

// Lazze \\

I too have a laptop with one firewire port. I capture to a USB2 external drive and have had no problems whatsoever so far, although it's not my main editing system and hasn't had that much work. The specs include P4-3GHz, 512 MB RAM, XP Pro (Media Centre Edition).
Some people might be interested in this real world example, with a twist. Earlier this week I installed the demo of DV Rack from Serious Magic. Using it I captured "live" to the external drive, no tape in the VX2000, and could immediately scrub and play back the resulting DV AVI files. No system issues at all.

David Hurdon

Thanks for that! Made my desion on which external hard drive, based on your guys input. Cheers!