External HD's and the Vegas Workflow.
 

I just wanted to see if anyone has had any issue editing from a Firewire HD in Vegas. I am planning on purchasing a 600gig external enclosure and a Firewire 800 card for the faster through-put. I am hoping that it will still deliver smooth video. I am working from a Dell Demension 4550, 2.5 ghtz P4 1gig ram with a 128mb ATI. Any suggestions would be helpful.

No problems. Many people use firewire HDDs.

Works Great!
 

Devin,

I use Vegas 6.0 on an HP Media Center with a Pentium D (the new Intel chip) at 3.0 ghz and at 2gb ram. I have an external fire wire drive that is running at 7200 rpm and it is 1.3 TB. The brand i use is Lacey and HP. The speed is no different than that of my internal 250gb HD. Personally, if you can afford to do so i would get a HD that has usb 2.0. The fire wire connection is a tad bit slower, and the USB 2.0 is faster. But if your dell does not have USB 2.0 (and only has usb 1.0) then buy the fire wire by all means!

be aware that windows has some issues with firewire devices..
of the 16 people i have asked, all but one of them has had issues with losing the system volume indexing..

i have personally lost 1 enclosure (LaCie) which i then put into a cheaper enclosure (Blue eye) and then i jsut bought another enclosure for the hell of it (SkyMaster)

Both of these units have lost their file systems in as many weeks...

Good info, and thanks. I am planning on the speedano enclosure. USB 2.0 is faster than firewire???? I was not aware, this HD has Firewire 800, and USB 2.0 on it. Very strange......... not that it has both, but that firewire is the more expensive upgrade and not the 2.0.

Firewire 800...my mistake
 

Oh, you mean it has firewire 800. Yes thats mucho faster than usb 2.0 but standard firewire is much slower.

Ummm...actually Firewire 400 is faster than USB 2.0; Firewire 800 is much faster.

Read this comparison.

Double-post mistake.

[QUOTE=Peter Jefferson] ... issues with losing the system volume indexing ...
QUOTE]

Peter, can you describe what happens (or stops happening!) when this disaster strikes?

Thanks.

Ian . . .

Hmmm, never thought this problem could be due to Windows, but it does make sense. I bought a LaCie 400 gig Firewire 800 Drive and it lost all of my data for my feature. This drive has been a COMPLETE disaster. LaCie's tech support has been of no help to me either.

yup, it definately is a windows issue..
i thought it was vegas, but it wasnt..

hard to describe, but basically windows has issues accessing or updating the Sys vol info through firewire for some reason.

from here, ive lost a Lacie also, and 2 other drives, lucky for me i ran GetDataBack and recovered all my actual files intact, without losing anything (3 major projects) all that was gone was the voluem info, the actual data within retained its integrity..

right now though, im runngin USB2.. havent had a problem since..
theoretically usb is faster thatn 1394a, however its a spiked speed and not as constant as 1394a, 1394b is faster however all these speeds are dependant on ur Mobo FSB and how ur system is configured..

Thanks for that link Patrick, it answered something I've been wondering about for awhile.

i have seen this problem before, there is an error message indicating that the drive has lost connection or something(?)... i tend to think that it is not a windows issue, rather, it's a hardware issue... i have not seen lost data as a result of it, and most firewire drives do not have that problem... i would be looking at the firewire chip being used in the computer, for starters, maybe try putting in another firewire card?

there is a function within windows where it indexes the filenames on the drive so that you can do faster searches... i don't think that is what you are talking about, but fwiw, it most definitely should be turned off, because it slows down the system.

as you pointed out, usb 2.0 has a faster spec than firewire, but in the actual implementation, tests have shown that firewire has a slightly faster overall datarate... firewire 800 is beyond all of that.

hey dan,
yeah i went through all that and worked through 2 pci 1394 cards (lacie and pyro) as well as the onboard firewire on my IT7max2 (old but very stable mobo)
i honestly dont think its the actual chipsets on either the pci units or the native connections on the mobo, but even when running the firewire windows patch, it still doesnt resolve the issue.
most of the time it works fine, then out of the blue, the drive would be lost.

Nero is a great instigitaor of this volume failure within windows as well, and i know about 6 people whove lost drives this way.
Other times, when lettign vegas sit idly for a while, the drive would just die..
basically being seen as a local disc but wondows considering it to be unformatted. This has happened twice on 2 different drives on one machine and only once on a newer unit which is my offline editor.. so its not a coincidence... its strange though coz the Lacie worked PERFECTLY for over 6 months, i didnt even have to switch it off..

ive tried index restoration SW with no luck, ive literally had to go through and salvage files using getdataback and extracting the files from there...

Hi Guys,

I'm sorry to hear you are all going through the Firewire nightmare in Windows XP. I was there for a long time (two years), tried many fixes, and lost a lot of very important data. I even tried switching to USB 2.0 for a while, only to find out that it has it's own set of problems too. Here's what finally fixed it all:

http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/for...ssageID=370439

I've been running with this patch for many months now and I haven't had a single drive connection failure. I hope this helps. I know how I felt when I was in your shoes.

John

tried that patch and the same day the second drive got shot.. mind u i had vegas sitting idly for 4 hours while i saw a client, but that patch may not work for everyone..

it's not necessarily a question of who manufactures the firewire card or even the firewire external hdd box, but rather, it's a question of who actually made the chipsets involved... is it t.i.? oxford 911? etc.... i have found that texas instruments 1394 chipsets are solid.

my neighbor has a western digital external hdd that works fine with usb 2.0, but not with firewire... i don't know what chipset it has, there is probably some diagnostic software that would reveal that info.