[fatarabb]

I have a LaCie 75GB FireWire hard drive and I use it for video editing. I have found that the drive is not fast enough however. When I try to edit with clips stored on the hard drive, they drop several frames and seem choppy. The manual says that "striping" the drive will make interaction between the computer and the hard drive faster. Is this a good solution or do you have any better ideas? Also, please state whether the information on the drive will be erased when striping or with any other solutions. Thanks in advance.

[milhaus]

What system is running on? OS and hardware? I have been told that if the firewire drive and the camera are attached to ports on the same bus, this slowdown can occur. The fix is to capture to the internal drive, then move to the firewire drive, or buy anoter Firewire card PCI or PCMCIA, or wait for the new drives. Good luck. BTW, how is the Lacie drive? Is the fan really, really loud?

[scottiB]

"Striping" stripes (ahem) more than one drive (2, 4, etc.) into one volume (two 36GB drives into one 72 as an example). Data is spread over both drives, and the speed increase results from both drives reading/writing rather than just one (this is not to say the speed, infact, doubles). This method is prevalent in SCSI drives where the SCSI bus is fast enough to handle the throughput.

VST offers a striping software for its FW drives (only).
http://www.vsttech.com/vst/products....umber/fireraid

A cool site, www.barefeats.com tested various FW striping techniques: http://www.barefeats.com/fire12.htm

So, you'd need two FW drives to stripe, but I believe that the your FW drive's IDE to FW bridge is the actual bottleneck. I've run into the same problem with an external FW drive. My only remedy was to put a large HD in my iMac and use the FW for back-up.

I'm sure others can be more specific. Good luck.