I know, it's not a place one visits regularly, but I went there today. I've been editing a piece from nearly four hours of tape, and hoped I could manage my 60 GB video drive to do the job, likely to be about two hours. It became obvious that I couldn't without painful workarounds so I thought I'd put another internal drive in (to make 3). When I realized I had no open bay for it I started thinking firewire external. At noon I bought a LaCie 120 GB firewire drive. Then I had lunch and a nap. Believe it or not the subsequent installation was flawless, the format to NTFS likewise. To cap it off I found I could use the second input on the back of the drive to bring up my firewire network, which I've been accessing through my Audigy Platinum sound card break-out box, now plugged to the LaCie. I can't recall the last time any install went so perfectly. After the install I ran the Canopus raptest.exe to check the read/write speed of the external drive. It was faster both ways than my Maxtor Diamond Plus 7200 rpm internal video drive which has served me perfectly for almost a year. I dumped 30 GB from it to the new drive in no time at all and now have all the room I need to carry on without having to move the project from its happy home. I realize one should wait for a question before giving an answer but sometimes it's helpful to hear that what you wonder about actually works. Or maybe I just want to spread the joy. By the way I'm running WIN2K SP2 on a P4-1.8.

Ain't firewire great!?!?
I have 2 on my system a 40 Acom and an 80 Maxtor and I love 'em. I can switch them over to my laptop also. I have an old Pll that serves me well but doesn't have enough room and the firewire solution has worked great.
Don

Great to hear, and yes, you are welcome to post "this went well"
stories! People even learn from these!!

Thanks.

Good to hear, I always wondered about those devices and now I won't be so hesitant to check them out. Thank you.

Just make sure that it's a 7200rpm drive. The 5400 will work, but the 7200 works better.