Can you use these to actually capture video from the camera? Ie, record to the drive rather than to tape? I wasn't aware you could, but I heard from someone recently that indeed you can.

Cheers.

J\

if you are willing to pay a bit more(around $60 us) http://www.coolmaxusa.com/product/pd_list/product_usb_list_02.html
i do have an external enclosure and a hd rack.
the beauty of an external case is you dont have to shut down pc to swap the drive, just plug and play.
it works great and i never had any problems. i also capture video on the external drive, no drop frame.

I use the Genica mobile racks. $7.00 each from Computergeeks.

http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=GN210

I use them in my Pyro ADS firewire enclosure, or mounted into a CD-ROM bay on an IDE channel. I have 4 complete kits and about a dozen of the trays, which I use for each clients hard drive. I have had "zero" problems with them in the 2 years I have been using them.

EW: I recently went on the ADSTech site and read in the specs that this case *supports* ATA100 but will NOT actually *give* it.
Is that an important feature for video editing and do you have these same specs on your enclosure? (I know they've been doing at least 2 versions of this case)

I use a brand called "inClose" that is sold through Fry's electronics here in Oregon. The caddy with one tray is about $20, and extra trays are about $10. Mine is the type that requires a shutdown to swap drives, but it's not a big deal to me.

For laptop editing, I bought an ADS Pyro firewire enclosure. This product is normally designed to take a hard disk internally, but, ever the tinkerer, I bought another one of the InClose caddies mentioned above and was a able to shoehorn it inside. Now I have the best of all worlds: a firewire (hot-swappable) external case that I can load with any of my growing collection of 120GB drives!

Getting the Inclose caddy inside involved removing one of the cooling fan screws and a portion of the fan shroud, gently bending a connector over at an angle, and folding the IDE cable up accordion-style to make it all fit. But the system works great.

fUtZ:
I wouldn't worry too much about the ATA100 speeds. None of the current drive can really take advantage of such high speeds, and for video work I would doubt very much if you could see ANY difference between, say, ATA66 and ATA133.

Hello Jason,

If you mean use a removable hardrive in a rack like this to capture from the camera to the drive without first capturing to MiniDV (or digi8) tape, the answer would be no (from what I know).

They do make digital drives that can record straight to a hardive, but they cost thousands of dollars last time i looked.

The item I am asking about is an actual 5400/7200 hardrive that is "plugged" into a ATA or IDE interface that sits in one of your unused 5 1/4" drive bays. The hardive is placed into a tray and you can slide and connect that tray into the installed bay and use it as a regular hardive. The company boasts how you can use it as an alternate OS, or a different user HD. Its basically connecting a HD to your internal IDE cables, but this way you can keep swapping drives (only some models are hot swappable, not all).