http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10128

I found the dumb down version of this at Best Buy, you can also get the 500gb for around 360.00 on the web. I'm thinkiing of getting the 500. Frankly, I've run almost out of interior case room, 5 internals, 2 externals.

Yes, I'm a video horder. :}

A good place to get external drives is newegg.com. I wouldn't pay any extra for firewire 800. The bottleneck is the sustained throughput of the hard drive, and firewire 400 or USB 2 is fine.

Robert,

Yeah, newegg.com is a great place. I really should buy stock in newegg to recoup my money. :} That's a good point about the firewire not being worth it. The only thing I was thinking is that with the firewire, it might be an advantage to capture on via laptop.

With the lacie's I was looking at, the firewire is about 30 bucks more. But good stuff, thanks for the feed back. I haven't made a decision about what to buy yet, I'm still chewing on it.

I got a 250GB USB 2 external HDD for my laptop at newegg for about a hundred bucks (rebate deal), and it's great for capture, thus far (some generic, that appears to have a WD HDD inside the enclosure). I wanted it to be on USB, so I wouldn't be sharing the firewire bandwidth between the cam and external HDD.

Also, depending on your camera, it might be best not to share the firewire bandwidth with it... I know that GL-2s (and thus probably GL1s???) are known to have a bug wherein they bump other items off of firewire...

I learnt this the hard way...

Raza

The bottleneck is the sustained throughput of the hard drive, and firewire 400 or USB 2 is fine.

A lot of benchmarks show that the firewire400 and USB2 interfaces are bottlenecks... i.e. barefeats.com.

2- Anyways, to get on topic a bit...
the only thing I can add is to avoid the Prolific chipset (i.e. a lot of Bytecc USB2+firewire enclosures). They are buggy.

Lacie is one make that uses the oxford chipset, which is better.

What is meant by bottleneck in this discussion?

It's "the thing that slows performance".

If you think of a water system, the bottleneck would be the pipe where the diameter is the smallest. All the water would get backed up there and would have to fight to get through.

Or if you think of an actual bottle... how fast the water flows out depends on the size of the bottle's opening/neck. If you like soda instead, it's like the big gulp-style cans versus the normal cans.

Thanks, but I know what bottle neck means in general. I was wanting to know how it is applied to these connection speeds. I guess that one device pulls more than another. When you say that 1394a and USB 1.1 are bottlenecks, why are they, other than being inherently slower than firewire 800 or USB 2.0?

Most benchmarks show that firewire400/1394a is slightly faster than USB2.

The speed differences between theoretical and practice is presumably due to overhead. I'm not sure if this is a good analogy, but DVDs hold 4.7GB of data, but about 0.4GB of that is used for error correction (that would be the overhead).

For firewire, I'm not sure what the overhead bandwidth is used for. I don't bother myself with those details.

There's almost got to be some overhead for error correction, but I have no idea how much that would be or what type. Speed will also be affected by CPU speed, efficiency of the device driver, and the load on the CPU from other processes (it's not DMA).