USB 2 should be enough to handle this. DV data is 30Mbps and USB 2 can handle 480Mbps. USB 1 is only 12Mbps so it wouldn't be fast enough. An external firewire drive would also be fast enough for the task at 400Mbps.

I bought a 8o gig Buslink brand, external drive, and have not had a problem yet ! I hooked it up to a 1394 firewire connection, but I believe it also supports USB2.

i use an external western digital 200gb firewire. works great. processor is 1.7, 256 ram dell 8100. internal drive is 60 gig. not enough when playing with video!!

I've got a Maxtor 250AV. I use the Firewire connection and it works great.
Don't go with USB unless for high volume/transfer tasks. USB sucks up CPU, Firewire doesn't. No bumps in the get-a-long when you are renedering.

In fact, I've got a Sony firewire DV Recorder too, on the same firewire bus.
Firewire --- gotta love it!

To capture DV from the camcorder, do you simply daisychain the camcorder to the external harddrive?

I have 2 Maxtor external (firewire) drives, and one Western Digital USB 2, and that is where I keep all of my Video Captured files. I use one of them for all of my sound effects, pictures, and then the third one for my MP3 collection

My only caution to any of you is "Back up", "Back Up", I had a disaster this past Dec when one of the Maxtor drives basically was unavailable nor was the data. I lost about 120GB of files and of course none of it was backed up. I priced out the cost of attempting to recover the data and it was going to be almost $1000. Needless to say I did not do it but I am now a Backup expert.

To capture DV - via firewire with an external drive ...do you simply plug the camcorder into the external drive? It works "seamlessly?"

No you must use the capture program to capture. You must plug the camcorder into another firewire port then with the capture program, you select the location to capture to. In this case it will be the drive letter of your external drive.

I use an external (Maxtor, Firewire) drive, and have no problems either capturing or printing to tape.

But I do have problems with Screenblast when editing. When previewing it often hangs for 30 seconds or so, and I get an error "unable to mix audio". This seems to be a known limitation going back to VF 2.0 days (there was an old thread about it).

What I find is when I'm editing, at first this will happen a lot, but the longer I edit this gets less and less frequent. So I've learned to live with it.

Mark

Which BackUp program do you use?

Kgresko...which BackUp program do you use?

I do not use a backup program, I just use Windows Explorer and drag and drop the files.

My laptop has only 1 firewire port. If I hook up the external drive to that port, the only place left to hook up the camcorder is the firewire port on the external drive. I thought firewire allowed you to "daisychain". As described earlier, I assume you then capture video and save to the external. I just wanted to know if someone has actually done it. Otherwise I don't understand how to use the firewire. The reason I ask is that I just bought a firewire external drive - but my laptop is being repaired.
IW