I had a Lacie external hard disk. I lost all my data twice, they replaced it twice in six months in a long drawn out warranty exchange process.

When my 3rd Lacie died after the warranty expired, I decided that maybe another brand would be a better choice. I went with internal disks in RAID and my quality of life has improved.

Can't comment on Lacie drives, look too Macish for my tastes but I've used other drives in the same config without problems. In fact our main capture system is just that, an old 900MHz PIII VAIO wirth one 1394 port daisy chained to HDD and then VCR.
We have had issues with some of the older VCRs and cameras in this setup but I think those devices had early generation 1394 chips in them. DSR-11 and DSR-45, no problemo.

Bob.

Don't have experience with LACIE, but I have no problem capturing directly to external Firewire drives, all on the same bus. I've done it on several different computers, including a laptop that only had a Firewire PCMCIA card. You may, however, have to upgrade your Windows Firewire driver with one of several Firewire patches (there is one for SP1 and another for SP2).

I have 2 firewire external drives- one 80 gigs from back in the day and one 500 gig drive. No problems with either. The 80 gig drive I have had since somtime back in 99 or 2000 and the the 500 I just got in the past year. They both are chained together.
I used to run the 80 on a laptop that had no firewire port, but I did have a pcmcia card and it worked fine.

edit: I forgot to mention that those two drives are both LaCie :)

j razz

Thank you all for your responses. Looks like I better keep away from Lacie HDD.
I see that one 1394 port may work in the config of
Laptop -> firewire -> HDD-> firewire -> camera / DSR20 deck.

Im using two Lacie Porche Ext Drives. I lost a folder with all my video work on it once and had to painstakingly use a file d
recovery program to get all my work back. Luckily I got 90% of the stuff back. since then and before they've worked fairly. Sometimes they disconnect for no apparent reason: "Windows write delay failure". I think its the poor quality of the Firewire connections or something.

Sometimes daisy chaining the drives and my camera works ok and sometimes not. I capture to internal drive and then move it to external for editing.

Sami

The DSR 20 is I think a fairly old VCR, you may have issues with more than 1 device on the same bus as it. I've never even seen a DSR 20 so I could be way off base but certainly the DSR 40 can be more problematic than the DSR-11 when it comes to sharing the one 1394 port.

One answer to the dropped frames issue is to put in another host controller (OHCI card) in your PC. The other immediate one is to look to the USB2 port on the same enclosure or shop for a USB2 or FW/USB2 | FW/USB2/ESATA setup.

Lacie aren't a poor quality brand, IMHO. They've made a mistake with the >200GB drives in their arsenal, as they've chosen Maxtor which has proven unreliable in this application. I've had about as many problems with Maxtor Plus8/Plus9 drives as I've ever had with the earlier Deskstar 60GXP. So I don't hold too much of a grudge, but am now buying Seagate or WD primarily, with Fujitsu/Samsung as a last resort (mostly due to underperformance). Maxtor have been sundowned now, which I'm currently indifferent about in the current climate, although competition is always good to see bubbling away and I'm sure many of the original staff did excellent work for us consumers.... Maxtor drives in passive cooled portable equipment enclosures seems to be an issue, but then many 500GB and above drives seem to have an early death issue from speaking to mates in IT. All well within the warranty period.

I'm not so sure there is a perfect brand for this end of the ATA market. Plastic having replaced glass for the platter substrate/medium seems to be a good indicator that the costs have perhaps been shaved too small in recent years.

Sometimes precision engineering doesn't get better, just cheaper and reliable enough to work long enough to sell a system to you! Still, you can buy more of them and put the effort in yourself to ensure that you are less likely to be affected by a major failure. Hard discs have always been a bit of a conundrum for price:capacity:performance:reliability:warranty.

Quite a mixed response for daisy chaining / Lacie reliability.

Bearing in mind that editing on the laptop is not a regualr thing, should I be looking at USB2 drive?

Why not get a firewire hub - they are cheap enough.

And on the Lacie 250 gb, I have been using a firewire 800 one for about a year, and it has been faultless. I cart it around in a drink cooler bag to hook into different computers; it rolls around on the floor of my car which daily travels over rough dirt roads, so it has hardly had an easy life. It runs cool and silent, and runs happily on FW 800, 400 or USB. Maybe I have just been lucky.

Usually the camcorder/deck behaves on the firewire but, and the controller has enough isochronous (reserved bandwidth) for a data transfer to occur as well. However a firewire-hub is no more of an advantage to having a daisy-chain port on the drive, IMHO. The chipset on the drive (not the bus passthrough electronics) is the part which is not behaving itself, possibly exacerbated by Windows OHCI drivers, but that would only be proven if you compared Win to OSX.

This doesn't stop you from trying anyway but external drives that are reliable with FW(1or2) and USB2 are not at a particularly big premium and have often proven to be faster for USB2 where they serve both. There is a lot of junk out there (even well known brands), so I encourage you to do your research.

The original post was about daisy-chaining and concurrent firewire bus utilisation to handle DV into the computer where the secondary storage element is derived from a firewire drive (device letter).

Firewire implementations of external storage continue to offer better performance than USB2 (with lower CPU utilisation). However, this post is about doing more than just using a firewire storage system. So USB2 is a reasonable next choice. Hopefully surpassed by ESATA and (a performance implementation of NAS using) GigEthernet as time goes by.

The original post was about daisy-chaining and concurrent firewire bus utilisation to handle DV into the computer where the secondary storage element is derived from a firewire drive (device letter).
I have suddenly realized that there is a large gap in my undertanding of connecting and using storage devices. So may I rephrase my question.
If I have a laptop/secondary editing computer with firewire port and USB2 port, what sort of hard disk (USB or firewire) should I go for.
I may use the laptop
1 - to capture / edit when I am away from base (Holiday!) and then use the files on my main edit computer which uses caddies
2 - to possibly use the lap top as a capture device for a camera on live events.

I see that USB takes up more CPU time than firewire but would that hinder my work flow?

It runs cool and silent, and runs happily on FW 800, 400 or USB. Maybe I have just been lucky.
Wombat, that sounds pretty cool but what does mean. I would have some of that if I understood what it meant.
Does it mean I can have FB or USB as and when I like? probably not!!

I buy IDE drives on sale, usually $25-45 for 100-200 GB. I then buy a cheap (under $25) USB 2.0 enclosure. I capture and render from these external drives all the time on my 3.5 year-old 2.8 GHz P4, single thread/core/CPU computer running XP SP1.

> Does it mean I can have FB or USB as and when I like? probably not!!

Yes, it means exactly that. If you have just a standard firewire link, it will run happily on that (FW400); if you have the superior FW800 link (not usual on PCs, but standard now on Macs), then you can hook it in that way and get faster transfers - very useful for really big files; and if nothing else is available you can use it as a USB drive.

Wow! A hard disk that can be FW or USB. Thanks guys for all the info.
I am going to hide in a corner and read up on external HDD interfaces. I am ashamed to say that I never fully understood USB interface. Okay back to Google.

Mahesh? You good?

Anyways, I have five Ext drives each can be USB and/or f/w.

I started my NLE work with a Dell ME Laptop. Dell had a VIDEO f/w port. After much experimentation I supplemented this ONE in/oput with a PCMCIA Maxtor F/w doubler.

So, I had the Video IN/OUTS on this 4pin Dell configured video port, and access to my Canon XM2 - BTW, it also TOOK my video out via a Dazzle to a DV<>AV convertor ONTO a VHS/VCR deck and thence ONTO a CRT PAL monitor. Still with me? OK, and here's the thing, the Maxtor PCMCIA port/s which was the START of the F/W daisy chain. This then serviced my 2 Maxtor f/w drives.

. .and guess what??? It worked!

The secret for me was keeping the VIDEO INs/OUTs purely on this Dell Video Configured port. If I tried the Maxtor PCMCIA card then all hell would break loose. Dropped frames. Clunky access times to the Maxtors. The Canon would freeze up. Not a good experience at all. Now I aint saying this WILL happen to you, but hopefully what I'm suggesting just may get you out of a fix. Keeping the Video INS/OUTs on a separate port to the actual f/w head of the chain.

Grazie