Just got a new Dell 2650 laptop, and am thus forced kicking and screaming into the dark waters of Windows XP Pro. I bought a Pyro drive kit and installed one of my WD 120GB drives in it, and it works great--in one direction, transferring files from the drive to the laptop. In that mode, it does about 15MB/sec, which is plenty for DV work. The problem is that the data rate going the other way, from laptop to Pyro drive, is only about 3MB/sec, and so of course when I try to capture video from my miniDV camera to the laptop/Pyro combo, I drop frames all over the place.

I am still learning the nooks and crannies of WinXP Pro, but surely there must be some obvious function I haven't turned on. By the way, I don't think it's a DMA thing, since during the slow transfer the CPU is only working at about a 5% level, so that implies to me that the processor is not the cause of the bottleneck.

Any suggestions? I don't think the Pyro interface is at fault, since it transfers just fine in both directions when used with my desktop PC.