Firewire drives on PC- Fast enough to edit?
 

I was wondering if anyone has used firewire drives in Windows XP for editing - I know they work well on the Mac, but are they fast enough to edit directly from on a PC under Windows XP professional?

Also, does anyone have any experience using these types of drives to edit with a Matrox RT Xtreme 100? (I know that a separate firewire port is required for these drives.)

Salut,
Steve

The topic on editing directly on a firewire drive has been covered several times here, so search around and you'll find plenty. But to sum it up as far as whether or not you can edit directly on a firewire drive: no problem! Lots of pros do it, and so can you. Whether it's on a Mac or a PC, it makes no difference.

That is no problem indeed. If you want to know a bit more about
firewire performance under XP take a look at my test

Thanks... a firewire 2 card from Adaptec and firewire 2 drives seems to be the solution... backwardly compatible (I presume) with the Focus FS-1, and good high speeds when connected to the computer... there are no issues with doing this, I presume?

Steve

Are you talking about firewire 800? I've only used the "normal"
firewire 400 equipment myself. That's just as fast as USB2 is and
fast enough for DV. Whether or not the newer equipment will
work with the FS-1 I don't know.

Let's hope someone in the know the responds to that.

Whether or not your firewire 800 card is backwards compatible with a standard firewire 400 device depends on the connectors on the card. Firewire 800 has a different preferred pin arrangement; however, most firewire 800 cards provide standard 400 connectors for full backwards compatibility.

Also, while USB2, in theory, is supposed to be uber-fast, it never quite meets the capabilities of firewire in a DV editing scenario - USB consumes some CPU power, so it's real time speeds, especially in a back-and-forth throughput scenario such as DV editing, is never what it's promised to be.

Hi Steve,

All the FireStore products (FS-1, FS-2, FS-3 and DR-DV5000) only support FireWire 400 hard drives. However, this should be more than adequate for DV25 editing.

Hope that helps.
Matt McEwen

How about this drive from Lacie?
 

This drive has both types of connectors on it, I would presume it would therefore work, and you'd get the added benefit of faster performance once it's connected to your PC.

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10117

Hi Steve,

Two drives I recently tested with FS-1 which worked quite well were:

http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Ma...re%20and%20USB

and

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/pro...asp?DriveID=79

The Lacie's are good drives, but need to have their firmware down rev'd to work with FS-1. The Maxtor and the Western Digital worked right out of the box.

Hope that helps.
Matt McEwen