Will a USB External Drive Suffice for Editing in Vegas?
 

I am currently using 1394a external hard drives, but have a problem with one of the drives dropping off when I add a camcorder to my system (for capture).

Because of this issue, I was thinking about USB this time around.

My primary workload will be adding FX filters to an AVI file in Vegas 6.0, then exporting.

Would I be digressing by going with USB?

alan

I use USB drives all the time (at work and at home) and haven't had any problems whatsoever.

Ditto.

Camcorders interfering with hard drives on the IEEE-1394 bus is a well known issue. Many of my external drives are USB and FireWire but I always use the USB option.

Excellent...thanks
 

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

I'm off to get a new drive.

alan

Wait Alan!! there is a get around to the problem. I always load the camcorder first and get it regonised before starting up the ext HDD. It works fine. Firewire will be better for editing. I have both options with USB and Firewire.. my advise is to go for the latter.

I use external/usb for both editing and capturing. You just want to make sure you don't get a crappy drive. I would stay away from generic drives. Honestly, one of the best things I have is an icy dock usb/firewire bay and I just swap drives in and out. It's like butta.

I run my deck THROUGH the drive :-)

Computer -> firewire -> hdd -> firewire -> deck

I can still capture/PTT with that external drive in this configuration as well!

One of the things that can happen when you daisy chain the drive and the camcorder/deck is that the IEEE-1394 bus will drop its speed to that of the lowest device on the bus. Typically, this is the DV device and can result in the drive running at 100Mbps instead of the expected 400Mbps. Whether this happens is very specific to the camcorder/deck. Either way, the bus can only support 400Mbps in total so if data are being transferred to/from the DV device, it will take away from the overall bandwidth available to the drive (though a drop of 25Mbps + overhead is relatively minor).

One point regarding USB external drives. I use two Seagate 320GB Barracuda drives for storing all my master HDV video clips etc. These were relatively cheap about 6 months ago and seem to work really, really well on USB 2.0 ports. They are 7200 RPM, both set up as NTFS (not FAT32) and have a 8MB internal buffer.

I was wondering if the newer external drives with 16MB buffer that are starting to appear everywhere now might be better for video editing?

Any comments from anybody that knows the details on this kind of stuff?

Andy

Just bought 2 USB drives
 

I just purchased two Hitachi 1T USB drives.

Each has a 32mb buffer.

If I load a file off of that drive, and a copy of the same file off an internal 10,000 RPM Seagate drive, there is a noticeable difference in performance.

The Seagate drive is 150 gig and cost twice as much as the Hitachi.

I also have Firewire drives, but use them for normal data, not video editing.

For the price, $199 each, I could not pass on the Hitachi drives.

I am also editing AVI files, as opposed to smaller MPEG files.

alan

I assume you are seeing the internal drive being faster.

Current generation external USB and FireWire drives will never compete with the speed of an internal drive, especially modern SATA ones. Depending on the flavor of SATA, it can achieve transfer rates of 300MBps, i.e., 2400Mbps compared to both USB2.0 and FireWire 400's approx 400Mbps.

USB drives also consume a little CPU power.

My external drives have both USB2 and Firewire 400. When I capture from my camera it is plugged into the firewire and the drive into USB2. When I'm editing I switch the drive to firewire. Less use of CPU cycles and it works great.

Duane

Where are 1Tb hard drives for sale at $199, that is all I want to know! Never mind, I see now that they were external drives.

A bit off subject, I personally have moved to all internal drives. I set up a server last week due to the slowness of externals. Externals are great for mobility, but I got tired of them otherwise, especially the firewire issues.

I took an old tower that accomodates many drives, and hooked it up to my workstation via ethernet which is a 1GB per second connection. I run raid 0 on 2 sets of 500GB SATA drives and back up everything twice. Transfer rates are extremely fast. Since I run an ethernet connection for my broadband, I had to add an inexpensive NIC card, but otherwise it was an almost no cost solution to my storage issues.

Tell me more about your setup.
 

Does your ethernet connection between the two computers require that you be running server/networking software, as opposed to plain Windows XP?

thanks..alan

Not at all. I had the same question when I thought of the idea. I did learn however I couldn't run through my router which is a 10/100 connection. I needed two ethernet connections on each machine, and they each should be 10/100/1000 or Gigabyte connections (same thing), and they must be, as it was explained to me, "auto-sensing" to avoid the need for twisted cable.

You need at least "Cat 5" cable (Cat is abbreviation for category) which is available at any PC store. If you need further details, e-mail me and I'll tell you what I can. It is relatively simply and cost effective, and so much better (for me) than externals. There is the issue of always running two PCs at once, but other than that I feel tremendous freedom having gotten rid of those pokey old externals, which I'm putting up on ebay soon!

If the PCs aren't otherwise on a network, all you need to do is connect the two via their ethernet cards - you need to use a "cross-over" cable, though, which are readily available.

For Gigabyte (i.e., 1000Mbps) ethernet, you need Cat 6 cable which is pretty much the norm these days.

If both PCs are already on a network, you're set. The bandwidth consumed by broadband is peanuts compared to what will be used for network storage. i.e., broadband activity won't interfere.

There's some (easy) configuration to do on each PC so that they can "see" each other.

The downside to network storage is that both PCs will consume CPU time to manage the transfer and there can be significant latency.

For Gigabyte (i.e., 1000Mbps) ethernet, you need Cat 6 cable which is pretty much the norm these days."

I replaced my CAT 5 cable with CAT 6 and noticed no difference except that they cost me $15 apiece. The difference is negligible, in my recent experience. I didn't recommend CAT 6 cable because I felt it was a waste of money.

"If both PCs are already on a network, you're set. The bandwidth consumed by broadband is peanuts compared to what will be used for network storage. i.e., broadband activity won't interfere."

Re: broadband, I was referring to the fact that initially I networked through a a 10/100 router which slowed my tranfers to a crawl.

There's some (easy) configuration to do on each PC so that they can "see" each other."

Run the network wizard on each PC.

"The downside to network storage is that both PCs will consume CPU time to manage the transfer and there can be significant latency.[/QUOTE].

Since data transfer speed is more than doubled, and the fact that CPU resources are tied up even more when transferring large file to and from an external hard drive, it is well worth it IMO.

If you don't need an internet connection on your server, than it only needs the single ethernet connection to run directly to your workstation. Then your workstation needs two ethernet connections, one to your router or broadband modem, and one to the other PC.

Just to add a bit to USB drives. I use external ones on my Toshi laptop and they are great for capturing and editing.

One slight drawback is that the external Maxtor 3.5" 500Gb drives need to be powered from AC thru a plugpack, which means I cannot edit on my laptop easily when I am away from home.

I do have an 80Gb 2.5" usb drive in an el cheapo case that is powered from the laptop; I do most of my editing on that with Vegas MSP, but render when I am at home onto one of the powered Maxtors. So the 80Gb travels with the editing laptop, no power required, and render only at homebase.

For sheer convenience, you really can't beat USB drives, that is for sure. They do work very well.