external hard drive

[ashannon0]

I am looking for an easy way to download digital video to a laptop computer. I video wrestling matches for my son's wrestling team and would prefer to download the video to an external hard drive attached to a laptop. Then take the hard drive and do the video editing on my home PC. What will I need to get to enable me to do this task?

[sixf00t4]

you can get a usb external hard drive and that should be all you need! maxtor makes a good one, and iomega just came out with some too.

How much data are you transferring? Is the data stream compressed or raw video/audio? If your notebook has a CD-RW, I would recommend chopping the data and burn it to a disc(s) if at all possible.

As to external storage. If you can plug in a few wires, you may be able to save yourself several dollars by using an aftermarket HDD enclosure. This would allow you to purchase any cheap 3.5" IDE drive, thus possibly saving you upwards of $100-150.

I recently reviewed on such unit here at TechIMO:

http://www.techimo.com/articles/index.pl?photo=82

Also, you will definitely want a Firewire or USB v2 compatible HDD enclosure to maintain enough transfer bandwidth to make this project a viable solution.

Good Luck,
Robert Richmond

[Annihilator-X-]

USB 1.0 externals are extremely slow, it may take up to 3 hours to transfer 2GB of data. Or if you have USB 2.0 support for your laptop. Otherwise USB HDD are not a solution for Vedio editing.

Instead see if you have IEEE firewire port in your laptop or buy some PCMCIA adaptors for such ports.

Anyway I don't know why people love Maxtors and IBM so much. Say performance and noise, they are no way near Western Digital. See Tomshardware benchmarks. Actually I have Maxtor and WesternDigital HDDs myself too. I found my WD HDDs faster and quieter. The new 250GBs external HDDs are cool

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20030915/index.html