HARD DRIVE VIA USB, IS THIS OK?

grant99 · Post by **grant99** » Fri May 25, 2007 11:25 am

Hi
is it ok to save your captured video via a separate hard drive (no operating system) which is linked via USB 2? or is it best having a internal one?
cheers Grant

daniel · Post by **daniel** » Fri May 25, 2007 11:42 am

We have seen enough posts here with people sharing the various problems they have when trying to capture via USB, which was never truly intended.
That's why firewire is almost exclusively used.

USB 2.0 technically should be able to do it if you have one single device active. What I hear is it fails about everytime beyond very short captures.

But nothing prevents you from copying the captured file afterwards to anyplace you like.

grant99 · Post by **grant99** » Fri May 25, 2007 12:26 pm

hi daniel
i think you have misread my question, i only capture through firewire, my question is actually saving the avi (dv)file from pc to external hard drive which is linked via usb
cheers grant

grant99 · Post by **grant99** » Fri May 25, 2007 12:32 pm

basically, they say capturing video to a separate hard drive is best, my additional hd is a external one connected via usb is this ok?
#cheers grant

Black Lab · Post by **Black Lab** » Fri May 25, 2007 1:33 pm

That's exactly how I do it and I've never had a problem.

daniel · Post by **daniel** » Fri May 25, 2007 2:47 pm

grant99 wrote:hi daniel
i think you have misread my question,

You think right.

daniel · Post by **daniel** » Fri May 25, 2007 2:54 pm

grant99 wrote:basically, they say capturing video to a separate hard drive is best, my additional hd is a external one connected via usb is this ok?
#cheers grant

I think this applies more to the rendering phase, where it may help to have the original and rendered files on separate disks (separate partitions would not help). A capture from AVI is merely a kind of network copy.
Since your cam is another "disk" than your target drive there's no point that I can see.

Anyway I have the impression that with the current speed of disk interfaces, memory access, and cache size, it's more of a good governance advice than something that still really matters.

Trevor Andrew · Post by **Trevor Andrew** » Fri May 25, 2007 3:38 pm

The original title was

HARD DRIVE VIA USB, IS THIS OK?

Does this mean that you are capturing via USB to your PC,
Or
Transferring the already captured data to a different drive.

If the later then there is no problem. It takes as long as it takes.
Downloading/Copying/ Transferring, takes as-long as the system is capable of.

Capturing is another matter, It has to be done in real time.
Your camera runs, and the data has to be captured in real-time.
There are buffer under run which helps.

You connect the camera, to the fastest device you can.
I would recommend ¡¥Firewire¡¦ for capture.

Regards

Have a nice weekend

daniel · Post by **daniel** » Fri May 25, 2007 3:47 pm

Trevor,

I made the same mistake, he's copying through firewire and just sends the DV-AVI file to the ext drive. USB 2.0 should be able to cope.
Black Lab confirms.

Windows will spool the data if the target can't cope which would be marginal.
If he has not 20 USB devices running there should be no glitch, it's only streaming.

Full DV uncompressed would be something else with 60+ GB/hour.

Black Lab · Post by **Black Lab** » Fri May 25, 2007 3:49 pm

You are correct, Trevor. Let me clarify my "that's exactly how I do it" statement.

My VS is on my computer's internal hard drive. I capture my video clips from my camcorder, via firewire, to my external HD, which is connected to my pc via USB2.

Trevor Andrew · Post by **Trevor Andrew** » Fri May 25, 2007 4:57 pm

Hi Jeff

Just to clarify:-
You connect your camera to your pc¡¦s, motherboard /firewire card.
Capture using the external hard drive as the capture/working folder.
This is of course connected via Usb2 to your pc.

Or

You connect via firewire direct to the external hard drive????????
Is that possible??????????

Black Lab · Post by **Black Lab** » Fri May 25, 2007 6:18 pm

Sorry for the confusion. Seems I have to clarify my clarification.

Yes, Trevor, my camera is connected, via firewire, to my pc's firewire card. The capture/working folder is my external hd, connected to my pc via USB2.

I think we got it.

Post by **Ken Berry** » Fri May 25, 2007 11:11 pm

Or to (mischievously) muddy the waters, you might have an external hard disk which has both a USB and Firewire connection (I have a couple of cases like that).

But yes, I have occasionally done the same with no problems using a USB 2.0 drive as the final recipient of my newly captured files. However, more recently, I have put in an internal 400 GB internal drive solely for my video captures.

And as a footnote, I used to do it all the time with an external firewire hard drive, connecting the camera direct to this drive via firewire cable (and with the drive connected to the computer also via firewire). But I started having trouble with false writes or the drive locking up. Looking into the matter (with some assistance from THoff, who seems to have, sadly, disappeared from this forum), I found that many of the chips used in external firewire cases were prone to this sort of behaviour. So I switched to external USB 2.0 and have never had a similar problem with the five external cases I now use...

GeorgeW · Post by **GeorgeW** » Sat May 26, 2007 3:46 am

I also routinely capture directly to external drive kits (Firewire and/or USB2).

Regards,
George