External Hard Drive to Edit HDV? Need Tech Help!!!

Greetings all! I have a laptop that I want to use to edit HDV. Since a laptop can only have one on-board hard drive, I have to look at external hard drives. The biggest/easiest option is the almost standard 2.0 USB port hard drive. There are firewire hard drives, but if I occupy the only firewire port on my laptop, I can't capture my video to that drive. Such a dillema. Laptop has a Core Duo CPU running XP Pro.

Someone told me that there's a way to run a serial ATA external drive from a laptop. Any knowledge about that?

Any recommendations? Anyone working HDV on a laptop?

Many thanks in advance.

Max

Max

You can run 3.5" eSATA drives from Express 34/PCMICIA cards. There are a plethora of them out there. But you need to have a power plug for those drives, thus losing portability.

Alternatively, you can also check out the La Cie Little Big Disk. from 160-320GB drives in a FW800/400/USB2 enclosure. If you have a powered FW400 drive... you can daisy link them (even if the manufacturers don't recommend this. There's plenty of bandwidth for it.

You can aslo get drives that have two firewire 1394 ports in them. You plug your camera into the hardrive itself then run a cable from the firewire port on the laptop to the drive. Sucks it straight into the drive and not through the computer to the drive somewhow.

I've recently started doing exactly what Wags describes. I've got a Western Digital MyBook 500Gb that I use with my old Sony laptop and I daisy chain my Sony Z1P to the laptop via the hard drive using two 4-pin to 6-pin 1394 cables.

However back at my office I run the Western Digital drive on USB2 because somehow that works faster with Vegas 7 on my desktop. I get delays with 1394. So don't discount USB2 on your laptop either, it may be fast enough and leave your 1394 port just for the camera.

Also I've successfully used a PCMCIA "cardbus" IEEE1394 card for years on my laptops with the hard drive plugged into that and the camera plugged into the laptop's native IEEE1394 port.

By the way I've seen laptops (UK models anyway) from Dell and Sony that could take 2 internal drives (might need to swap out the DVD drive though), and I'll definitely be looking at that for my next laptop.

For the mobile editor, i am a huge fan of the Lacie Little Big Disc. I have the 320Gig drive and can keep several projects on it at once. It is both firewire 400/800 and usb 2.0. Pick up a 2-Port NitroAV FireWire800 Express Card for USD80 and now you have a complete mobile editing drive. The added bonus is it is bus powered via FW400:) so great for airplanes. So, here's what you got:

Capture: Connect drive via Express Card Nitro AV FW800 and Plug cam into FW400 port.

Edit at desk: Continue with EXpress FW800 connection to drive for great data transfer rates.

Mobile Edit: Connect via FW400 port for good but slower data transfer.

-Shawn