My experience with firewire drives hasn't been very good. If just used for storage OK, for print to tape, probably not. Depends on your setup. If a laptop is involved, you may be stuck. If not and you only have a desktop system(s) if you need portability, take a look at removable drives which slide in and out of a drawer. Not only much cheaper, almost any IDE drive will fit in a drawer, they run off the computer's power supply and my experience anyways they seem better suited and more sturdy.

Firewire is certainly no better and as BillBiy has said many people have had issues with them. I guess the attraction is failry universal portability. I suspect where many people come unstuck is trying to run the camera and the drive off the one firewire port. If you stop and think out the data flow (bear in mind it has to go from the drive to the CPU and back to the camera or whatever) you can easily see why its just not a good idea.

With a machine with multiple ports with each one driving a device would seem much better assuming each port has its own channel back to the PC's bus.

What about dropped frames?

ZippY,

Let me offer this analogy ...

You need a moped in order to capture without dropped frames; an old bicycle just won't cut it. The drive you bought is a Ferrari.

Don't worry about dropped frames because of that drive.

I may be living a charmed life, but I never have any problem with Firewire. Yes, it's true, if you daisy-chain firewire devices then the data needs to shuttle back and forth, but so what? The bandwidth of firewire is something like 50MB/sec and DV is about 4MB/sec. Even with overhead, there is plenty of room.

I don't doubt that some users have problems with firewire, and I don't begin to understand what the possible reasons could be. Perhaps some chipsets are not as stable as others.

As an aside, I bought a cheap Dell Inspiron laptop last January and had a horrible time with firewire. Turns out that Dell had screwed up that part of the BIOS that controls the firewire PC card interface. It took a user to track down the chip vendor, get a patch, and call it to the attention of the Dell community. With the patch, firewire runs great on the laptop. To this day, Dell has refused to admit it made a mistake, and has refused to rewrite the BIOS.

Hello riredale,

I have an Inspiron 8200, and am getting ready to purchase an external firewire HDD. I'm curious to discover if I may be affected by the problem you mention. Would you mind pointing me to the web site containing the patch just in case?

Thanks!

How many hours of video with audio can I put on a 160GIG Drive?

...**about** 7 hours.

I'd say a bit more - 12 hours (~13Gb per hour)