I just bought another dirve and I want to know if it matters whether I diasy chain them or if I plug right into the firewire card. Is one better than the other? Am I going to notice a diffrence in speeds?

Daisy chaining puts them all on one channel. Firewire can do a max
of 400 mbit/s which you can probably interpret as 40 MB/s. So
if you put multiple drives on one channel this max will more easily
be saturated. However, if you have a PC your PCI bus has a max
of 133 MB/s, so three cards is definitely the max, but probably
two will saturate the system pretty fast already...

Just to clarify, plugging them into the SAME firewire card only gives you a little bit of a gain in terms of speed because they are sharing the same buspath into your computer anyway, but chaining adds a little more distance for that second device to have to go. Also, some devices don't play nice on a chain.

To get better speed you need separate firewire cards for each device. But doing DV you don't really need that.

<<<-- Originally posted by Rob Lohman : Firewire can do a max
of 400 mbit/s which you can probably interpret as 40 MB/s. -->>>

Since there's 8 bits/byte, why wouldn't 400Mb/s be 50 MB/s?

Until recently I daisy chained FW drives in three different configurations:

- DV cam to a FW drive to my PC
- VCR to a Canopus ADVC-100 to a FW drive to my PC
- FW DVD burner to FW drive to my PC

This was with a 4 year old Dell 900 MHz P3 laptop with built in FW. Never had a problem with dropped frames doing capture or bad discs doing burning.

Good luck.

Dennis

So basically its doesn't really matter because they are all on the same firewire card? Same speed whether its plugged into another dirce or right into the card?

another question...

I noticed that both my external HD are formated in FAT32. I figure this is so that no matter who buys it and what OS they are using it will work. But since I use Windows XP, should I reformat them in NTFS? I thought I heard somewhere that XP runs better and faster on NTFS drives.

Insight?

Pretty much the same speed because it is on one card. And most devices should work chained, but there are some devices, especially cameras, that don't like to be chained.

I believe FAT32 is limited to file sizes of 4GB and NTFS is more efficient with large volumes, although both NTFS and FAT32 support 2TB of storage... anyone else want to chime in?

You definitely want to reformat to NTFS. FAT32 limits file size to 4GB, which means the maximum size clip you could capture to the drive is about 18 minutes. DV requires 12.9GB/hr.

There are also other benefits such as speed and security.

The only reason not to use NTFS is if you want portability to OS that do not support NTFS, such as Mac and Win9x.

Ok, so is there a way to get to that blue reformat window other than putting in my windows disk? Or do I just right click on it and reformat it that way?

<<<-- Originally posted by Pete Wilie : <<<-- Originally posted by Rob Lohman : Firewire can do a max
of 400 mbit/s which you can probably interpret as 40 MB/s. -->>>

Since there's 8 bits/byte, why wouldn't 400Mb/s be 50 MB/s? -->>>

I always calculate in some overhead....

Clint: right click on a drive in my computer and choose format, make
sure that the file system on the screen that follows is set to NTFS.

Also make SURE you are formatting the right drive!!!