I have a 200 gigexternal drive that is both. I am running Windows XP Pro; have a 1.67 ghz athlon xp (I know it's time to upgrade); 1gig of ram; and a firewire card with 3 ports that have this hard drive, one other one, and a camera all pluged into it. Which would you run? This drive will be used to capture to. Rob brought this up and I thought I would ask the masses about it. Thanks.

USB 2.0. you don't want to capture and send from the camera through the same fire wire bus. IF you have separate fire wire cards, then you could use fire wire, but if not, use the USB2.0. It technically is faster than FW, but real world tests show them to be equal.

I have a laptop with an external drive connected via firewire and a deck connected to the external drive via firewire. It captures and prints just fine. There's no problem having both connected via firewire - even a SINGLE firewire port. My vote is firewire.

However, either should work fine. Just connect it both ways, test it, and see which you like best.

IF you have separate fire wire cards, then you could use fire wire, but if not, use the USB2.0. It technically is faster than FW, but real world tests show them to be equal.

Not that it's a big deal, but Firewire 400 is actually a little faster than USB 2.0 in the real-world. See http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0%2C1759%2C844061%2C00.asp.

A quote from the article:
"Though USB 2.0 is rated at a higher throughput speed, FireWire delivered faster performance on external hard drives when connected to a desktop."

(Then of course there's FireWire 800 which is slowly trickling into the market.)

But it's all academic as both USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 hard drives are more than fast enough to capture DV video to.

Clint, we can all the recommendations we want, but as Edward said, just try it both ways and see which you like best.

Well I have always done Firewire when available. But This hard drive has been giving me trouble and I was wondering if it was because it was so big. That's why I asked if I should be using USB2.0. I keep getting a Write delay error when I'm working and I have to restart the computer and sometimes I lose data. Very sucky.

Clint,

What is the brand/model of your external HDD?

If your hard drive uses a prolific chipset, you NEED to flash the firmware or take the drive out of the enclosue and install it internally. Eventually the file system will get corrupted and you'll need Active Undelete (PC) or similar program (i.e. PCI File Recovery?) to get your data back.

Microsoft also has some "fixes" related to the "Delay Write Failed" error.

A quick search found that our very own Rob Lohman, done a small test to find out which connections worked best.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=24612&highlight=firewire

Cheers,

Pete--It is a Maxtor one touch

I've always found firewire to be slightly faster than USB, plus it's nice to use the second port on the external drive to connect to my camcorder (daisy chaining).

Firewire800 is another story....

firewire is far less processor dependant.

Still, usb2 can work, but I think the best for remote work is a sata card and enclosure.