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USB 2.0 vs. Firewire
I’ve read in the posts that firewire is preferable to USB 2.0 when connecting an external drive. Can someone explain to me why it is so? Will it change the quality of my video?
Any light that you may be able to shed on this would certainly be appreciated.
Thanks
Mossman
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6 Replies
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The quality of the video is not a question because you are transfering digital information. Firewire drives have the advantage of being able to have several daisy-chained together. USB drives work fine also.
Gary Kleiner
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Also, firewire transfer uses less CPU. If you’re having speed issues, you may want to use firewire. I’m using 2.5inch drives on usb2 external with a sonoma chipset laptop M1.6 processor and have not had any dropped frames. Of course, it pays to defragment the drive after each session. Also, they are 5400 drives as well.. if you have a choice, get a 7200rpm.
There are some 3.5 external sata enclosures that have both usb2 and firewire options.
John Hartney
werks.tv
Elgin, Illinois – Chicago area
847.608.1357 -
Firewire is faster in sustained data rate than USB2.
Take a look at some hardware review sites to see benchmark comparisons for various drives.John Schell
Convergent Design Inc. -
I don’t like firewire drives because my systems always seem to lose the drives every so often. Then I have to do a restart and it messes things up.
USB2 always seems to stay up for me though. Never any dropped frames or transfer problems.
s.
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I have not used Firewire drives but I have 2 Western Digital USB2 drives and they work fine. I have actually captured video and wrote to these drives and did not have any dropped frames. That was an accident but it did work. Reading off of the drives via Vegas I can only use Draft mode if I want fluid flow of video.
I typically capture to a 160GB internal drive and work on video projects on a 250GB internal drive (both Western Digital 8mb cache). That gives me the best performance. -
For recording video directly to hard drive using a laptop (as with DV Rack – now only $300) you need firewire and this is becoming more popular. Rack is soon to add HDV. However, you don’t chain them. You need a separate firewire card so the camera input and the drive output are on separate IRQs.
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