Cam ==> firewire card ==> external USB disk, will that work?
 

I'd like to transfer (or capture, unsure of the correct term) numerous tapes on mini-dv to disk. I'm using a notebook which currently doesn't have nearly enough hd space, though it is fast enough (has gotten short clips on board OK).

I have space on an external drive in a usb enclosure. IIRC, the drive is 7200 rpm Seagate several years old, but the bottleneck is probably the USB 2.0 connection. Will this work, or will I have dropped frames and a Big Waste Of Time?

I'm using XP SP3 and Sony Movie Studio 6.

I've done that once or twice, but personally I'd capture to the local disk first then move the files to the USB drive. Just better to be safe than sorry.

According to the specs USB 2.0 should easily be fast enough for a DV or HDV stream. This is what we do in the edit suites at University all the time because they lock the internal hard drive so we can only work from our own exteral disks. We've never had any problems with dropped frames while caputring in FCP straight to the External hard drives.

Good, it's at least worth a try. Did you set the external drive to cache or no (iirc, My Computer | ext drive | properties | optimize for performance OR quick removal. Last option seems to mean "write cache on|off". I leave it off normally, as the chance/annoyance of corrupt files is more significant that a slight performance hit. For real-time data (the camera doesn't handshake and rewind the tape if the receiving end wants the data replayed) IDK if that will work.

DV -- 25 M bits/sec or 25 M bytes?

DV is 25 megabits per second.

I go from my Canon GL-2 through my laptop's firewire to an external usb2 drive (7200rpm).
I also edit on Vegas from that drive.

Zero problems.