I need to bring my personal portable hard drive to the lab and pretty much work off this external drive. So if I buy a USB2.0 drive, is the connection fast enough? Or if I should go buy firewire 400 or 800?

I haven't had much luck with USB. I suggest you go FW800

Good Luck

 Firewire (400 or 800) is the AVID qualified external storage method. Having said that, I've successfully used USB2 drives, even bus powered 5400rpm pocket drives in the field, up to and including HD projects (but they really bog down the edit dealing with those file sizes). Technically USB is 480 mbps, but that's burst speed, FIrewire is 400 (or 800) mbps but that's closer to constant (neither is completely accurate-there's a a fair amount of bandwidth taken up with system overhead) if your projects are SD only, and you don't have several other peripherals running off the USB bus (there's only one, despite how many ports on the machine) USB works fine IMHO.

external drives I currently use (mostly for HD projects) have eSATA connections cabled through a pcmcia card on the laptop.1.5-3 gbps. Found a company on-line that packages Seagate Barricudda drives in an in-expensive housing with a variety of interfaces available.

firewire800: barely capable

sata II: yes

usb 2.o: a resounding NO

 For OFFLINE and DV you can work in USB2 without any problems,

cuervo:

firewire800: barely capable

sata II: yes

usb 2.o: a resounding NO

There is a major Scottish facility, with a couple of members on here, who will totally disagree with you! They have large projects on cheap bus powered external hard drives connected by USB. Last time I was using one of their suites it worked very successfully much to my surprise!

I would imagine most USB 2 drives will give you offline, online is a definate no-no, don't expect much support from Avid either in your efforts. If your looking at buying one, why not pickup one of those combined lacie drives with USB/FW400/FW800 - if your system doesn't work on USB you then have other connectivity options.

It's not supported/allowed by Avid (!) but it works up to 1:1, I never tried with HD

luca.mg:

It's not supported/allowed by Avid (!)

That's made my day and put a smile on my face .

Since when was it up to Avid to say what is or isn't allowed regarding what their users connect to their computers?

Sure, they can 'recommend' or issue 'guidelines' and advise that we use 'qualified' equipment - but if folk including myself wish at times to connect USB storage devices, just how exactly are Avid going to know we're doing it or even stop us?

The most important factor determining the ability of material to work smoothly with USB/Firewire is not the resolution of the clip at all. Be it SD, HDV, HD - it ALL boils down to bitrates and transfer rate limitations.

I have concluded a few tests here using an ageing USB 2.0 7200RPM Western Digital drive and a 1GB USB 2.0 Cruzer flash drive. Here's what happened:

PAL DV25 - Smooth playback/scrubbing on both devices from within Avid.
1080p24 DNxHD 115 - Smooth playback/scrubbing on both devices within Avid.
1080p24 DNxHD 175 - Smooth playback on the HD but topped out and stuttered on the Flash drive.

It's safe (for me at least) to say I'd happily if I had to, cut some stuff either SD or HD (in DNxHD format) on a USB 2.0 device (Especially if I had access to cutting in DNxHD 36).

If you run multiple video tracks atop each other using fancy PIP effects, naturally the bandwidth increases and you start to spot obvious slowing down.

Obviously, if I'm using USB storage I wouldn't expect a whole load of support from Avid's side of the desk, but that's fairly understandable.

 I sometimes use USB2 drives for offline, 10:1 and have no issue. 

I have used them with 1:1 pal and one stream of video playback is possible without dropping frames, I would add that it was horrible to edit with at 1:1 as  you have slow response to playing and scrubbing, but it works.

I thought Avid qualified USB drives for DV use years ago. 

I sometimes get a bit frustrated that even when I have drive filtering through resolution checked, if I have USB drive plugged in, it will still be a drive available for rendering and capture.

Sasquatch:

I would add that it was horrible to edit with at 1:1 as  you have slow response to playing and scrubbing, but it works.

Yeah, I'm with you on that. 1:1 is using a lot more transfer rate allocation as far as I'm aware, so it'd be a real b**ch to work with.

But for offline or even very quick cuts at DV25 or DV50 quality (or even DNxHD 60/90 720p material) I'd reckon USB 2.0 isn't all that bad. I'd use Firewire 400 or 800 if at all possible for that ensured bandwidth and lower CPU utilisation.

 I think on the XW8000, my first Adrenaling PC,  you needed a seperate FW card for FW drives as the BOB used the bandwith of the existing, so I never went down the FW route. 

I don't tend to use DV on account of it's field order being the opposite way round to all other resolutions, in PAL world.

 We use usb 2 externals 24/7 for offline resolutions up to 10:1 with 100% success, and recently we've used them for hdv media as well. I would add that we tend to buy good quality sata II drives and house them in third party external drive caddies - Antec's MX-1 is one of the best out there.

HTH 

malefunktion:

luca.mg:

It's not supported/allowed by Avid (!)

Since when was it up to Avid to say what is or isn't allowed regarding what their users connect to their computers?

Is isnt up to us.  We test on a multitude of configurations and recommend and support what works best and post that on our site.  If you have issues with configurations we havent tested or have and found limited, then you use at yor own risk and your milage may vary.

As for my system and USB... havent had good results across the board with it so for a confiruation that you want to get the most from.... I would not recommend it. 

Marianna

 Marianna,

That's what I was getting at by adding that Avid does recommend, suggest or advise on configurations and wouldn't likely be able to help in unapproved setups, but it was the original poster's use of the word "allowed" which really got my goat up.

It implied that in some way Avid could somehow police or punish those not doing things their way.

I apologise if my comments in any way seemed to frown upon Avid, though I felt my post was balanced enough to address both sides of the debate.

Marianna:

Is isnt up to us.  We test on a multitude of configurations and recommend and support what works best and post that on our site.

....Yeah, well that's fair enough Marianna We use USB 2.0 for HDV 1080i60 and it sometimes studders, but we usually don't care about that since we're grinding down to author an MPEG 2 SD DVD off of the timeline with chapter and thumnails using ASTK ver 5.7 with MC 3.0, or we're encoding to WMV 1080p or WMV 720p.

.....If it's something we're doing which must go out to a Tv master tape, then we switch to our Firewire external 800 Raid 0 drive, which we run off of a pluggin Xpress Card 54 slot in our HP laptop base station. The base station has its own (seperate) PCI e bus (not shared), and it all runs well with our regular MOJO plugged into our laptop's firewire 400 interface.

.....I do find the more stuff plugged into the USB 2.0 interfaces, then the slower that whole bus gets. Our wireless mouse receiver is plugged into our USB 2.0 interface on the base station, and this device slows things down abit. When we unplug everything from USB 2.0 and just have one of our external USB 2.0 7,200 rpm drives attached, then it's lightning fast rolling off at 32 MB per sec and nothing we can throw at it studders. If I get too annoyed at studdering, then I just transcode to DNxHD 145, or 220 X and everything plays perfectly smooth.