External Firewire Test, Conclusion-Some work, some don't

johnmeyer wrote on 2/6/2004, 4:00 PM
I've seen dozens of posts about external Firewire drives and Vegas. I had no problems with my Maxtor Firewire drive, but then someone gave me a Western Digital drive, and it had problems. I decided to do some controlled tests. Here are the results.

I did this on a Polywell 2.8 GHz P4. I connected my Sony TRV-11 and used it both for capture and playback to an external monitor. My Maxtor Firewire is a One-Touch model, and the Western Digital is a WD800.

I connected each on, in turn, to the same cable (i.e., only one drive was connected at one time, and they were not daisy-chained). I connected my Sony TRV-11 camcorder to the other port on my two-port Firewire card.

Capture

I was able to capture to either drive without any problems. No dropped frames.

Timeline playback

I was able to play back from the Vegas timeline, through my camcorder to an external monitor from the Maxtor. Everything worked exactly the same as playing back from an internal IDE hard drive. No problems.

From the Western Digital drive, however, when I clicked on the Vegas "Preview on External Monitor" button, it took about ten seconds for video to appear on the monitor. When I then started playback, the video disappeared. Complete failure.

Print to Tape from Timeline I was able to print to tape from the timeline to the Maxtor unit, but not the Western Digital.

Print to Tape from Capture applet Once again, the Maxtor unit worked fine, and the Western Digital unit almost worked, but after about five seoncds, the video went blank, and then restarted about five seconds later, and then kept repeating this cycle.

My conclusion mirrors what I have been reading over the past few months, namely that Firewire drives can work perfectly well, but if you get the wrong one, it won't work at all, except for capture.

Only Sony will be able to tell us whether this is due to a flaw in Vegas, or is inherent in some flaw in the Firewire implementation in some drives. IMHO, if there is any way Sony can fix this on their end, they should do it, because Firewire drives are definitely here to stay, especially given the need to easily and quickly "bolt on" additional storage for video projects. Hot-swappable IDE drives are great but, since this and other test show, Firewire is perfectly capable of working, there needs to be some way to make it more general.

Comments

farss wrote on 2/6/2004, 4:16 PM
John,
I don't quite see why you were trying to PTT to a drive?
But apart from that as far as I know the firewire drive is several layers removed from anything Vegas would have any control over.
If you wanted to point the finger at anything software wise it's more likely to be an OS issue or drivers or the 1394 hardware in the PC or the 1394 hardware/software in the enclosure and lastly ,far far from leastly it could be the drive itself.

Did you try connecting the same WD drive directly to an IDE port?

I'm not that keen on firewire drives, if you've got a Mac OK your stuck with having to use them but the great thing about the PC paradigm is being able to use things like SATA drives in plugable bays. This is a cheaper solution and a far more secure one. I've seen Mac systems with drives stacked up everywhere, a disaster waiting to happen IMO.
cyanide149 wrote on 2/6/2004, 6:43 PM
Your test does not rule out a Vegas problem with Western Digital drives. I have a Toshiba DVD drive that works in every program I've tried, but not in Vegas
farss wrote on 2/6/2004, 6:59 PM
But were the other programs NLEs?
There's not much else apart from video that doesn't stress a HD as much.
tadpole wrote on 2/6/2004, 7:28 PM
My Maxors have been working fine (usb conn) - Since my Camera connects via Firewire port, thought it was best not to have all the load on one interface (ie data from camera streams in over Firewire, and records to external drive via usb)

Can only imagine this would help out when using external drives ?

The other thing though, is drive speed - not so much as rotational speed rating on the box, but actual read/write burst speeds ect...

Ie - I bought a 7,200 rpm "rocketpod" USB drive some time ago - dropped frames left and right during capture - while my 5400 maxtor drive would work perfect - ran HDtach tests which revealed the rocketpod drive just stunk on actual read/write speeds..

John - have you tried runing HDtach on both drives? (believe they need to be blank for it to work.. so that might not be possible if you have data on them)



johnmeyer wrote on 2/6/2004, 10:42 PM
I don't quite see why you were trying to PTT to a drive?

Bad wording on my part. I was doing PTT from the Firewire drive to the tape.

John - have you tried runing HDtach on both drives?

I'm not aware of this app. I'll look it up and see what it does.
RexA wrote on 2/7/2004, 3:14 AM
Not sure if I understand these drives. They both came from the factory with a firewire interface? Or did you put one or both into a firewire box?

I'm wondering if they are both IDE drives inside, and hence could you swap drives between the firewire controllers? Just looking for a way to isolate more about where the problem is.

I don't think it applies here, but a few months back I put a WD drive inside my machine and found it worked sometimes but had problems with large data transfers in some cases. Turned out this new drive had an 8 MB buffer and I had to upgrade my mobo bios to get it working.

Another point FWIW is a problem I have with a recent WD USB2 drive. I bought the drive and put it in a noname USB box. It works fine on my Sony notebook, but when I hook it to my main system, I can see it in explorer, but it doesn't work right at all. I haven't figured that one out at all yet. I need to find more time to dig into it. I mention it just wondering if your problem could have a system-related factor too.
rextilleon wrote on 2/7/2004, 7:15 AM
The only problem I have ever had with external drives is enclosure failure--or should I say control card failure---Other then that I get pretty near flawless performance and I have had up to 4 drives daisy-chained. Go figure.
johnmeyer wrote on 2/7/2004, 12:03 PM
Not sure if I understand these drives. They both came from the factory with a firewire interface? Or did you put one or both into a firewire box?

The two drives I used in my test are external Firewire drives. They came as a unit; I did not open anything up and insert IDE drives into a Firewire enclosure, nor did I swap these drives in and out of enclosures.

I doubt very much whether the drive inside the enclosure has anything to do with the problem. This is an issue with the 1394/Firewire electronics in these units. I have used Vegas with ancient 4500 rpm laptop drives and it captures and prints flawlessly. 5400 rpm units should be just fine (the WD drive is 5400 rpm, and the Maxtor is 7200 rpm).
RexA wrote on 2/7/2004, 4:20 PM
>> The two drives I used in my test are external Firewire drives.

Ok. I thought that was what you meant, but I looked on the WD pages and there is also an internal drive that starts with the same numbers that you mentioned. The suffix determines the interface.
rmack350 wrote on 2/7/2004, 6:23 PM
RexA,

All of the disk drives used for firewire are IDE drives. The enclosures all use a bridge card that converts from the 1394 stream to IDE.

Eventually we'll see 1394->SATA bridges. That'll be handy for people swapping from a PC bay to a 1394 enclosure.

I've had tons of troubles with different 1394 hardware. My solution is to buy from local places that take returns. Fry's is great about this. Eventually you'll find a combination that works.

Vegas does indeed have it's own special problems but that isn't to say it's just Vegas. However, on bad 1394 hardware Vegas won't be able to play the same media that Windows media player plays flawlessly.

Anyway, it's good to know the Maxtor drive works.

Rob Mack

johnmeyer wrote on 2/7/2004, 6:55 PM
Anyway, it's good to know the Maxtor drive works.

And, it works perfectly.
RexA wrote on 2/9/2004, 1:59 AM
> All of the disk drives used for firewire are IDE drives. The enclosures all use a bridge card that converts from the 1394 stream to IDE.

Yes, I understood that.

Many manufactures sell drives already packaged into a box with the 1394 (or USB) interface. That was why I was unsure and questioned John... whether the drive he tested was just the IDE drive (in a box by some other manufacturer) or whether he had the version from WD that comes packaged for 1394.

WD makes both and they both start with the "WD800". Suffix letters following WD800 determine what interface is available (IDE, 1394, USB, SATA, etc.) I thought he was describing the drive already packaged from WD for 1394, but wasn't sure.

Of course, none of this changes the discussion. I just wanted to clarify why I wasn't clear about which WD800 John was talking about.
FuTz wrote on 2/9/2004, 10:56 AM
2 WDs mounted in trays into FireWire ext. enclosures here. The ATA100 model with 8Mb buffer. No problemas...at all.
They work flawlessly in both USB2 and 1394 form on my laptop too (I got these two types of connectors on the boxes).
I did not PTT with those up to now though...but capture via 1394 daisychain is A-1-A...
Inside my tower: Maxtors (3 different models). No problemas.
Nor with my Seagates barracudas inside my tower ...
Sometimes, it's a nice world...
johnmeyer wrote on 2/9/2004, 2:20 PM
WD makes both and they both start with the "WD800". Suffix letters following WD800 determine what interface is available

The full model number on my Western Digital Firewire drive that does not work well with Vegas 4.0d is:

WD800B002-RNN

Order number: WS800B02RNN