Comments

The_Voice wrote on 7/3/2003, 10:30 PM
Like USB, firewire can have "hubs", they run around $50.00 or so... and then you may have several friewire devices connected to and from it, or again, like USB - you may "daisy chain" your firewire devices...meaning you may hook the audio firewire card to the back of the HD (or vice versa) and work that way...

Give it a try before you you buy... see which one works for you.

Regards,

Frank F
Grazie wrote on 7/4/2003, 1:33 AM
Got Inspiron 8000 - now ancient, 2 year old laptop, running WinME - I'm using a MAXTOR PCMCIA firewire card with 2xf/w female connectors. Into one input I've got the start of my daisey chain [ all MAXTOR external firewires drives 7200rpm ] >>> F: 1x60gb >> G: 1x80gb >> H: 1x120gb >> I: 1x120gb. This is fine - BUT I do use the onboard Dell firewire to Capture and PTT - tried using the cammy on the daisey chain - nah! I'm not clever enough to figure out what is happenning. The set-up I use works.

Tell me - have you had a problem with drop out when your fan/s kick-in and out?

Grazie
Timhockey wrote on 7/4/2003, 4:56 PM
I will give you more feedback, just bought firewire card and will try to capture tonight.
riredale wrote on 7/5/2003, 8:50 AM
Firewire should have plenty of bandwidth for daisy-chaining. The only problem I have seen is that the Dell 2650 I have has a bug in the BIOS (that they have never fixed) that requires a patch and a fresh boot before capturing.
XOG wrote on 7/5/2003, 11:38 AM
Timhockey,

I've had success using an SIIG 1394 PCMCIA card. I've got two f/w drives daisychained, and also my camcorder. Everything works fine.

On my system, I have to disable the f/w drives and camera before disconnecting them from the system.

I used to have PTT problems, but resolved this by rebooting, turning off all programs running in background, and making sure all power managements settings are set to NEVER, when it comes to turning of monitor, hard drives, etc.

Cheers,

XOG
farss wrote on 7/6/2003, 1:38 AM
I think trying to capture or PTT with daisychained fwire is asking for trouble. Multiple disks not an issue.

The OS is very unlikely to actually read and write to a disk at the same time and even if it did and there's a contention and subsequent delay it's only a case of a bit of a slow down. However any data going to/from tape cannot wait. Your trying to pull data off one device on the bus and at the same time write it back down the same bus.

I'd have to say Apple have never done their users any favours by supplying only one fwire port on many of their machine for this reason.

Firewire hubs are very handy when you have multiple disks, they minimize the risk of losing the whole chain when one device is unplugged however you've still only got one port out of the PC to handle all the data in and out.
Timhockey wrote on 7/6/2003, 8:14 AM
Thanks to all that replied but I was at Comp USA so I forged ahead, actually I used my debit card, and bought a house brand 1394 card, an ADS external drive enclosure with 911 oxford chip set- despite the earnest statements from the kid working the floor that USB 2 is faster than 1394 and I could save some money, he was baffled when I told him that those of into digital video do not have that personal value set- and a Maxtor 120 gig 7200 rpm drive. Having only one firewire card with the mini end I plugged the camera and the hard drive into the firewire card and captured without any trouble even though I forgot to turn off wireless networking. I did not drop frames when the fan came on. At the time wireless was off.
I had to reboot to capture- Dell ? but I am beginning to really like XP, reboots are fast.
The laptop is a Dell 5100 P4 512ram 30 gig system drive, 32 meg ATI radeon video card. MPEG 2 renders about 40% faster than my mildly overclocked PIII 933 (1120) Thanks for the advise about PTT, I have not done so yet but will use the built in port based upon the advise given here.
One bit of usefull advise I picked up on this forum was that you should assign a letter name to your drive that is not replicated on any other computer you want to use the external drive on. My PIII has 2000 professional and my AO5, so I will be curious to see if it reads the external drive.