HOT! From Oct.13 CompUSA External 40G HD USB2.0/Fireware for $49.99

[Bfavre444]

I thought firewire enclosures are faster compared to USB 2.0. The oxford 911 chipset I've read can do 30MB/s on average. True?

Also, does this USB 2.0 enclosure have a USB 2.0 port on its back to add more USB 2.0 devices? (daisy-chains)

 

[ponch007]

Also, does this USB 2.0 enclosure have a USB 2.0 port on its back to add more USB 2.0 devices? (daisy-chains)

No

 

[The Saint]

I'm sorry to hear about your prob The Saint, unfortunately Sony's implementation of the Firewire standard isn't exactly "standard" so you'll have some problems with using your average Firewire peripheral with it.

Well, actually, that's the worst part about it. If you follow the link from my previous post, Sony's S200 implementation actually is completely standard, just I don't think many other people made implementations of it. Even the miniplugs on Vaios are part of the firewire standard, just parts not often used.....

 

[rdh]

It should be noted that the two rebates on these drives continues into Nov. The rebate slip has a couple of different dates on it, so it is best to buy and submit rebate by Nov 02.


Update on Performance....

I finally had the chance to crack open both drives. USB: drive is July 2002 manufacture WD ........ Firewire: The drive is an actual IBM Deskstar 120 GXP (not the Jupiter ...) and I think it had a May or June manufacture.


SiSandra gives the firewire drive (via an Audigy sound card) 21940kb/s (standard ide is 24000) . In reality, it took 38 seconds to transfer a 622MB file (16.36MB/S)


SiSandra gives the USB drive (USB 1.1 on K7S5A) , 967 kb/s, and it took 6.5 minuts to transfer 311MB
On my MSI KT3 Ultra2, I had a lot of trouble with drive, and I had to do some work.......

The drive would be seen in Win98SE, but any access would just hang the system. In reality, the system would get VERY slow... 30 seconds to recognize a mouse click. If I then simply unplugged the drive, the system would be fine BUT I would get the warning from the bundled software that I should not remove drives without running safe remove from their sw. This happened on two systems. So, I cracked the case. I unplugged the ide cable and had a look at the chip:

in-store
ISD300A1

I searched on the internet, and discovered the www.cypress.com website where I found that the ISD300A1 (aka CY4612 ) had a reference board and drivers for Windows 98SE/ME/200/XP High Speed storage devices. This led me to their
Windows Mass Storage Driver v.5.16

I unloaded the drivers that came in the box, rebooted, plugged in the acomdata usb drive , pointed at these drivers and VOILA....
it worked.
SiSandra gives the USB drive (USB 2.0 on KT3 Ultra2) , 17493 kb/s, and it took 60 seconds to transfer/write a 652 mb (10.87MB/sec). That is not too shabby when USB 1.1 was 0.8MB/sec

 

[lokitech]

I purchased an firewire version so that I can port video over from my iMac to the pc to burn on DVD.

I keep getting a problem when pulling video off my DV camera to the firewire drive in iMovie (on the mac), after about 12 minutes (about 1 GB of data), the drive will time out and it will stop receiving data from the computer. Now, drive is format for FAT32, so that its compatible to windows (the macs will mount pc partitions). The drive manual said to do this in order to use the drive cross platform. Now, when i copy from the macs HD to the firwire drive any large amount of data (tested with up to 12 gigs), i get an error at the end of the copy, but it seems that all the data gets copied over anyways.
Question is, does anyone know whether there is a limit in pulling data from a firewire source (DV camera) and writing to a Firewire drive (acomdata drive) at the same time??
or anyone getting any other problems with this baby??

Thanks...
LoKi

 

[lungster]

Originally posted by: rdh

SiSandra gives the firewire drive (via an Audigy sound card) 21940kb/s (standard ide is 24000) . In reality, it took 38 seconds to transfer a 622MB file (16.36MB/S)

I've tried my firewire drive on two systems - an ECS K7S5A and an FIC SD11. Each was setup with a generic TI based OHCI compliant PCI card running the default W2K drivers. The drive workd flawlessly. I ran SiSandra today and got a score of 23046 on the ECS system.

 

[Kuhlman]

My firewire was an IBM and my USB was a Seagate.

 

[db]

lokitech, have you tried uploading and saving from camera to your mac's regulare hdd, *then* xfr to the external drive?

 

[KennKaniff]

does anyone want to sell theirs?

 

[Bfavre444]

This is an Oxford 911 chipset so why isn't anyone getting 30MB/s? I see 21MB and 23MB in this thread. The reason I ask is that I'm concerned about whether it'll be fast enough for video editing. How could one get it up to 30MB/s?

 

[lokitech]

lokitech, have you tried uploading and saving from camera to your mac's regulare hdd, *then* xfr to the external drive?

gb, Yeap, thats what i am doing now. But this I only have 10 gigs free on the internal HD on the iMac. I may try reformating the drive under a mac format and get win2000 to mount it as a mac medium...

 

[rickon66]

I was in the local CompUSSR store yesterday and they had some of the firewire drives back in stock, the rebate is still good until Nov. 6.

 

[rdh]

Originally posted by: Bfavre444
This is an Oxford 911 chipset so why isn't anyone getting 30MB/s? I see 21MB and 23MB in this thread. The reason I ask is that I'm concerned about whether it'll be fast enough for video editing. How could one get it up to 30MB/s?

All you need is to be able to capture at about 7MB/second for video editing (for DVD quality video). The firewire drive does transfers at 16MB/sec and the USB drive does about 11MB/sec.... even with some overhead, they should have enough bandwidth to capture whatever you want.

The 21/22MB/sec numbers are from SiSandra. In that Benchmark, an ATA100 40GB 7200RPM drive comparison average is 24MB/second, so the Firewire drive is performing almost as well as IDE drives hooked to the motherboard.

 

[dc]

Originally posted by: rickon66
I was in the local CompUSSR store yesterday and they had some of the firewire drives back in stock, the rebate is still good until Nov. 6.

but the instant rebate is gone right? so the final cost of the drive now is ~65 before tax, and that's if the double rebate is still valid.

 

[rickon66]

The drive was priced at something like $94.xx and it looks like the double 14.92 rebates are still good until 11/6. This is not quite as good as the deal of Columbus day, but it is still not too bad. For about $65 bucks you get a 40Gb 7200 rpm hd and a firewire enclosure that could be used for other ata/ide devices, or use as is.